AVANESSIAN, Armen
Future Metaphysics

“Bad times, but good times for metaphysics—Our society is suffering at every level from overwhelming challenges and crises of meaning that we have forgotten to conceive as metaphysical. The leaps in technology or advances in physics and other natural sciences that once sallied forth to alleviate or even liberate us entirely from our earthly problems are not necessarily of any further help to us. To the contrary, we are increasingly confronted by collateral damage from moedernity’s revolutions (climate change, for example) that threatens the life forms of our planet—humanity included—and thus more than ever raises questions which cannot be approached empirically.” [from the Introduction]

Armen Avanessian’s Future Metaphysics is an attempt at restating the importance of the great metaphysical categories for the present: how our contemporary predicament forces us both to reclaim them and to give them a radically new twist.

Translated by James C. Wagner.

Published by Polity, 2019
Philosophy