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OverviewImagine you suddenly find yourself in the control room of a vast technological apparatus, sometime in the future, where you are told that science has satisfied all the needs of all living humans. Furthermore, you learn, the next generation of the species will not be produced in the usual way, but instead by this machine, provided only that somebody push a little red button. The catch: you have to give a reason for pushing it. You hesitate: what do you say? Our own world is more like this scenario than we at first may be inclined to admit, not least in the fact that, mutatis mutandis, we seem to be struggling to come up with a good answer. The problem, says Rémi Brague, is fundamentally a metaphysical one. Now, mention of ‘metaphysics’ in decent society these days is likely to elicit a smile or an unimpressed shrug. If there is a shelf with that label on it in your typical bookstore you are as likely to find guides to crystals, chakras, or hemp care there as you are treatises by Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant. And, in spite of the ongoing revival of academic interest in metaphysics, it remains a rather specialist domain, a marginal sub-discipline in departments of philosophy, be they analytical or continental in cast. If you should take it too seriously, you’ll lose your bearings in the real world, and you’ll go adrift in some ethereal sea of dreams. It is, in a word, irrelevant – right? Wrong, Brague writes. Sustained reflection on the nature of being, undertaken in the hope that something can indeed be said about it, was for millennia considered to be among the most important of intellectual pursuits, and not without reason. With his characteristic combination of erudition and wit, Brague takes us on a sweeping tour of the discipline’s varying fortunes, from its early Athenian practitioners through its Jewish, Muslim, and Christian heirs, to the chorus of critics who in the last few centuries succeeded in putting an end to its dominance. But the questions that metaphysics was asking, Brague shows, did not disappear with its demise, and so, whether implicitly or explicitly, metaphysics itself has resisted relegation to the history books. For the nature of being, and especially our relationship to it, has continued to haunt its triumphant critics. One quintessentially metaphysical claim above all, as Brague suggests, seems to have horrified them: the doctrine that all that is, insofar as it is, is good. And yet, in rejecting the “convertibility” of the “transcendentals” of being and goodness, critics of the old metaphysics – Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Carnap, and Levinas among them – in their own ways offered metaphysical counter-claims, even as they turned increasingly anthropological in their interests. They also raised the stakes. For, whether the denial of the goodness of being can legitimately be attributed some causal responsibility for a world in which our species could rapidly and deliberately ensure its own extinction, this is the world we live in, and that denial does form the basis of the intellectual background from which we tend to begin our speculations. If we need to be able to articulate reasons for our project not to end, then we also need to rethink the rejection that we have come to take for granted. What Brague offers us here is not a narrative of decline, not a Jeremiad, not a nostalgic lament for the thought-world of a bygone era, but a sympathetic outline of some of the major tensions in the philosophical underpinnings of the modernity that we all inhabit. As such, it forms a part of his ongoing effort take modernity “more seriously than it takes itself”, to expose its hidden foundations, and to push it to its logical conclusions. In so doing, he hopes to help clarify where it is that we are going as a species, and to ensure that wherever it is, there is room for us humans in it. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Rémi Brague , Brian LapsaPublisher: St Augustine's Press Imprint: St Augustine's Press Dimensions: Width: 15.90cm , Height: 1.40cm , Length: 23.30cm Weight: 0.310kg ISBN: 9781587310409ISBN 10: 1587310406 Pages: 120 Publication Date: 03 October 2019 Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Professional & Vocational , Tertiary & Higher Education Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsTable of Contents Foreword ~ CHAPTER I Metaphysics as knowledge and experience 1. FROM A BOOK TO A NOUN-AND THEN TO AN ADJECTIVE 2. A PHILOSOPHICAL DISCIPLINE 3. A DIMENSION OF THE HUMAN BEING 4. FILLING THE VOID ~ CHAPTER II Putting Metaphysics Back in Its Place 5. THE MODERN DESTRUCTION OF METAPHYSICS 6. METAPHYSICS AS AN INTENSIFICATION OF PHYSICS 7. THE KANTIAN EXODUS ~ CHAPTER III Nihilism, Pessimism, and the Rejection of Metaphysics 8. THE RISE OF NIHILISM 9. NIHILISM AND PESSIMISM 10. THE CONVERTIBILITY OF THE TRANSCENDENTALS 11. THE DESIRE FOR THE GOOD ~ CHAPTER IV Being as Mere Existence, Life as Mere Contingency 12. THE REDUCTION OF BEING TO EXISTENCE 13. THE DESCENT INTO VOLUNTARISM 14. THE CONTINGENCY OF LIFE 15. SELF-ENVY ~ CHAPTER V Autonomy and Immanence aboard the Modern Ship of State 16. WE'RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT 17. AUTONOMY 18. THE IMMANENT SOCIETY 19. NOTHING IS EASY ~ CHAPTER VI Suicide and the Love of Life 20. SUICIDE 21. SUICIDE AND IMMORTALITY 22. THE LOVE OF LIVING AND THE LOVE OF LIFE ~ CHAPTER VII The Self-Destruction of the Human Race 23. PUTTING AN END TO THE METAPHYSICAL ANIMAL 24. THE TOOLS FOR THE JOB 25. THE BURDEN ON EACH GENERATION 26. COLLECTIVE SUICIDE ~ CHAPTER VIII What Right to Life? 27. MORTALITY AND NATALITY 28. THE RIGHT TO PROCREATE 29. THE END OF CONTINGENCY 30. PRODUCING HUMANS ~ CHAPTER IX Beneath Good and Evil 31. THE AGE OF BEING 32. THE INFRA-MORAL BASIS OF MORALITY 33. THE STERILITY OF ATHEISM 34. THE ABUSIVE BUS ~ CHAPTER X Metaphysics as the Object of Freedom 35. A RETURN TO PLATO 36. THE EMERGENCE OF FREEDOM 37. FREEDOM AND THE GOOD 38. SACRIFICE 39. FAITH OR DEATH ~ Conclusion IndexReviewsAuthor InformationTab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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