Abstract

The fifteen essays which comprise this book are unified by an unmistakable philosophical voice, and addressed to an interlocking set of concepts: cause, law, event, action, feeling, freedom, and intention. Collectively they trace the loops and bights of the Welt-Knotte, where the physical and the psychological orders tie. But the book is more than a collection of bright inter-referential papers by a clever man, and its existence is justified by something greater than the value of having them bound conveniently together. For it can be read as a kind of journal metaphysique, with advances and reversals, where early theses can be retained only by dialectical modification, and intuitions retained at the cost of sacrificing intuitions, and a kind of relentless will-to-system can be perceived coming to self-consciousness through the medium of invited papers to the routine conferences and symposia of academic philosophical life. What we have in the end is thinking, rather than specimens of thought.