At the root of modern thought lies the question of limiting the universalist claims of human reason. Since Kant, a universal subject, referred to as "transcendental," has overseen the necessity of natural laws and assigned contingency to empirical experience. In this, his first book, Quentin Meillassoux develops a different understanding of critique that is fundamentally distinct from the interpretation with which modernity has been satisfied since Kant. He demonstrates that only one thing is absolutely necessary: the contingency of natural laws themselves. This entirely new connection between the opposing modalities of necessity and contingency places thought in a relationship with the world that both classical metaphysics and the "critical" separation of the empirical and the transcendental cannot withstand.