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Merold Westphal has been in the foremost ranks of philosophers who proclaim a new post-secular philosophy. By articulating an epistemology sensitive to the realities of cognitive finitude and moral weakness, he defends a wisdom that begins in both humility and commitment, one that always confesses that human beings can encounter meaning and truth only as human beings, never as gods. This book focuses on this wisdom of humility that characterizes Westphal's thought and explores how that wisdom, expressed through the redemptive dynamic of doubt, can contribute to developing a post-secular apologetic for faith. This book can function both as an accessible introduction to Westphal for those who have not read him extensively and also as an informed critical appreciation and extension of his work for those who are more experienced readers.

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all frontiers (borders, boundaries, margins, limits) are being—often violently—challenged, erased or reinforced, it might be a matter of urgency to take up and rethink the very concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept, to be found or constructed? That is what this book begins to cast into doubt, on the basis of a reading of Kant, for whom the frontier turns out to be both the very element of his thought and the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Following what Kant himself would call this “guiding thread,” first in the “political” writings and then in the still little-read “Critique of teleological judgment,” I try to bring out a complex, abyssal, fractal structure, which always leaves a residue of nature—violence—in every frontier (including conceptual frontiers), and which complicates Kant’s most explicit, most rational arguments (which always tend towards cosmopolitanism and so-called perpetual peace) by adding to them an element of reticence or interruption. As it turns out that there can be perpetual peace only in death, we must interrupt the teleological movement that always might take us there, we must maintain some frontiers (and therefore a certain violence) in the very place where everything led us to believe that we should hope for their pacific disappearance, if only in the infinite perspective of the Idea of Reason. Neither critique of Kant nor return to Kant, this book also proposes a new reflection on philosophical reading, for which thinking the frontier is both an essential resource and the recurrent, fruitful, interruption.

While the question of life (whether bios or zōē) is not the explicit focus of any Platonic dialogue, it is, this book argues, an absolutely central and structuring question for all of Plato’s thought and, perhaps especially, for his ontology. This is nowhere more evident than in the Statesman, where the central myth of the two ages sketches out not only two epochs of human life and two models of human governance but two very different kinds and valences of life. Plato and the Invention of Life begins by offering a reading of Plato’s Statesman in order to ask about the question of life in Plato’s thought more generally. By characterizing being (whether in the form of the Forms or the immortal soul) in terms of life, Plato in many of his later dialogues, including the Statesman, begins to discover—or, better, to invent—a notion of life itself, that is, a real ortrue life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived. This emphasis on life in the Platonic dialogues will, this work shows, at once illuminate the structural relationship between so many of Plato’s most time-honored distinctions (e.g., being and becoming, soul and body, etc.) and help explain the enormous power and authority that Plato’s thought has exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition.

Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ reconstructs Romantic Organology, a discourse that German Romantics developed by combining scientific and philosophical discourses about biological function and speculative thought. Organology attempted to think a politically and scientifically destabilized world and offered a metaphysics meant to alter the structure of that world. Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Schelling, and Novalis shared the project of determining what sort of knowledge can count as metaphysical in a world filled with antinomies created by political and technological upheavals over the course of the eighteenth century. A new metaphysics, they reasoned, would need a determinate tool. Aristotelian scholasticism had long described logic a set of tools for philosophy, an organon. The organon’s etymological sibling, the organ, had a primarily physiological heritage (sense-organ, internal organ). Combining the medical sense of the term (from Albrecht von Haller and Johann Wilhelm Ritter) with the logical senses (from Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Johann Heinrich Lambert, and Immanuel Kant) of these related terms, the Romantics imagined their literary-philosophical efforts as the construction an “organ of metaphysics.” This terminological history is missing from the intellectual historiography of the period, especially in the important works of Hans Blumenberg and Michel Foucault. Building on the work of Frederick Beiser and Manfred Frank, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ shows how the Romantic synthesis of science and philosophy led to the invention of a modern metaphysics.

Our contemporary challenge, according to this book, is that a new world has quietly cropped up on us and is, in fact, already here. We no longer live in a world, but in worlds. We do not live in a universe anymore, but rather in a multiverse. We no longer create; we appropriate and montage. And we do not build sovereign, hierarchical political institutions anymore; we form local assemblies and networks of cross-national assemblages and we do this at the same time as we form multinational corporations that no longer pay taxes to the State. This book is a study of life, plural worlds, and what the authors call the struction or rebuilding of these worlds. The text invites us to view barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, “What's this world coming to?,” is used to question our conventional thinking about the world. One chapter articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, another chapter is a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French post-structuralist thought. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation, but of rebuilding. In the time of this rebuilding, the book argues that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what they carefully call the struction of dis-order.