Prolegomena to any future materialism. volume two, a weak nature alone / Adrian Johnston.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnston, Adrian, 1974- author.

Series:

Diaeresis.

Diaeresis

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Materialism.

Philosophy of nature.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.

Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981.

Lacan, Jacques.

Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.

Marx, Karl.

McDowell, John, 1942-.

McDowell, John.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (406 pages).

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, [2019]

Summary:

"In this the second volume of his trilogy, Adrian Johnston delineates the philosophy of nature requisite for a properly materialist theory of irreducible autonomous subjectivity. Bringing to light a hitherto invisible undercurrent linking together Hegelian "Naturphilosophie," Marxian-Engelsian-Leninist dialectical materialism, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology, and today's approaches to metaphysics and the philosophy of science on both sides of the analytic-continental divide, he assembles an ontology that dramatically transfors our understandings of figures like Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Lukács, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, and McDowell. In turn, this work looks to provide answer to the fundamental question: How must nature be conceptualized insofar as it happens to have eventuated in, and continues to contain the structures and dynamics peculiar to, full-fledged subjectivity? According to "A Weak Nature Alone," images of nature as akin to either a machine or organism in which each and every entity and event is governed by unbreakable causal laws preclude satisfying explanations of the emergence of human subjects with their spontaneous and self-determining capacities. Such explanations instead demand what Johnston as a "dialectical naturalism," namely, a materialism of a selfdenaturalizing nature radically altering itself in and through its human offspring. The transcendental materialism on display in "A Weak Nature Alone" is a systematic intervention that changes our senses of the philosophical past as well as the future while moving effortlessly within and between traditions and positions (Western and Soviet Marxisms, continental and analytic philosophy, etc.)"--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Preface. Tales of the endangered dead: historical essays in an underground current of naturalism

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Not-so-strange bedfellows: from Hegel and Marx to Lacan and McDowell

The voiding of weak nature: the transcendental materialist kernels of Hegel's philosophy of nature

Revivifying Hegel: breathing new life into Naturphilosophie

From Bern to Jena: the oldest agenda of Hegelianism

The self-subversion of modern science: scientific reason and the phenomenology of spirit

Real genesis: from the natural to the logical, and back again

The dialectics of impotent nature: substance and subject in the system of the mature Hegel

From scientific socialism to socialist science: the dialectics of nature then and now

The specter of Engels: the obscured history of Marxism's philosophies of science

This is orthodox Marxism: the shared materialist Weltanschauung of Marx and Engels

The three fathers of Naturdialektik: Engels, Dietzgen, Lenin

Breaking and bridging: Althusserian syntheses of historical and dialectical materialisms

Western Marxism's self-critique: Lukacs's final ontological verdict

Negativity mystical and material: privative causality from Pico della Mirandola to Lacan

The privation of science: lacking causes

There is absence, and then there are absences: back to Kant, forward to Lacan, and onward

The night of the living world: the missing link of the anorganic

Split brain, split subject: critically approaching a possible Lacanian neuro-psychoanalysis

The myth of the non-given: the positive genesis of the negative

Second natures in dappled worlds: neo-Hegelianism and the philosophy of science in the analytic tradition

Lacan with McDowell: the unresolved problem of naturalism

From the subjectivity of transcendental idealism to the objectivity of absolute idealism: returning to Kant and Hegel

Between bald naturalism and rampant Platonism: relaxing into McDowell's third way

More is less: psychoanalysis, science, and the decompletion of first nature

Piebald naturalism: freedom in Cartwright's image of nature.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0-8101-4064-0