Abstract

This remarkable little book starts with the premise that things often stand for something else, and proceeds to explore the metaphysical implications of this seemingly benign remark. A familiar instance is the subject matter of semiotics; however, as Paul Weiss discovers, not only do words have the capacity to signify something other than themselves, but also, and more interestingly, every aspect of Being, as well as Being itself, can play a surrogative role with respect to other aspects of Being. The conviction that animates this study is that systematic metaphysics can be usefully explored by approaching its subject matter mediately; that is, sometimes we better understand “A” through “not-A.” The book continues the project begun with Emphatics, which considers how ordinary experience stands in some dynamic relationship with a second dimension, which provides focus, interruption, significance, or grounds for the first. Surrogates is an ambitious, interesting, and challenging work, in many ways a representative final publication from a thinker whose astonishing energies and achievement spanned more than a full century of life and nearly seventy-five years of singular devotion to the labor of philosophy.