Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism

A Weak Nature Alone
Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8101-4062-2
Verlag: Northwestern University Press

Buch, Englisch, 396 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Diaeresis

Adrian Johnston’s trilogy Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism aims to forge a thoroughly materialist yet antireductive theory of subjectivity. In this second volume, A Weak Nature Alone, Johnston focuses on the philosophy of nature required for such a theory. This volume is guided by a fundamental question: How must nature be rethought so that human minds and freedom do not appear to be either impossible or inexplicable within it? Asked differently: How must the natural world itself be structured such that sapient subjects in all their distinctive peculiarities emerged from and continue to exist within this world?

In A Weak Nature Alone, Johnston develops his transcendental materialist account of nature through engaging with and weaving together five main sources of inspiration: Hegelian philosophy, Marxist materialism, Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology, Anglo-American analytic neo-Hegelianism, and evolutionary theory and neurobiology. Johnston argues that these seemingly (but not really) strange bedfellows should be brought together so as to construct a contemporary ontology of nature. Through this ontology, nonnatural human subjects can be seen to arise in an immanent, bottom-up fashion from nature itself.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Theorie, Politische Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface. Repeating Engels: Renewing the Cause of the Materialist Wager for the Twenty-First Century
Introduction: Tales of the Endangered Dead: Historical Essays in an Underground Current of Naturalism
Part I. The Voiding of Weak Nature: The Transcendental Materialist Kernels of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature Chapter 1. Revivifying Hegel: Breathing New Life into Naturphilosophie
2. From Bern to Jena: The Oldest Agenda of Hegelianism
3. The Self-Subversion of Modern Science: Scientific Reason and the Phenomenology of Spirit
4. Real Genesis: From the Natural to the Logical, and Back Again
5. The Dialectics of Impotent Nature: Substance and Subject in the System of the Mature Hegel
Part II. From Scientific Socialism to Socialist Science: The Dialectics of Nature Then and Now
6. The Specter of Engels: The Obscured History of Marxism’s Philosophies of Science
7. This is orthodox Marxism: The Shared Materialist Weltanschauung of Marx and Engels
8. The Three Fathers of Naturdialektitk: Engels, Dietzgen, Lenin
9. Breaking and Bridging: Althusserian Syntheses of Historical and Dialectical Materialisms
10. Western Marxism’s Self-Critique: Lukács’s Final Ontological Verdict
Part III. Negativity Mystical and Material: Privative Causality from Pico Della Mirandola to Lacan
11. The Privation of Science: Lacking Causes
12. There is absence, and then there are absences: Back to Kant, Forward to Lacan, and Onward
13. The Night of the Living World: The Missing Link of the Anorganic
14. Split Brain, Split Subject: Critically Approaching a Possible Lacanian Neuro-Psychoanalysis
15. The Myth of the Non-Given: The Positive Genesis of the Negative
Part IV. Second Natures in Dappled Worlds: Neo-Hegelianism and Philosophy of Science in the Analytic Tradition
16. Lacan avec McDowell: The Unresolved Problem of Naturalism
17. From the Subjectivity of Transcendental Idealism to the Objectivity of Absolute Idealism: Returning to Kant and Hegel
18. Between Bald Naturalism and Rampant Platonism: Relaxing Into McDowell’s Third Way
19. More is      less: Psychoanalysis, Science, and the Decompletion of First Nature
20. Piebald Naturalism: Freedom in   Cartwright’s Image of Nature
Postface. Points of Forced Freedom: Eleven (More) Theses on Materialism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

ADRIAN JOHNSTON is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of seven books, including Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy, all published by Northwestern University Press.