Spirituality and Dialectics (Hardcover)

Spirituality and Dialectics is a passionate and rigorous argument against nihilism and a manifesto for the party of meaning and hope. It demonstrates how we can ground principles of meaning and value, against the aesthetic and intellectual hegemony of the enlightenment--culminating most currently through postmodernity, as a basis for the critique of all present injustice. What emerges is a vision of a new social order that permits the full development of human social capacities. In Spirituality and Dialectics authors Anthony and Maggie Mansueto challenge the contemporary and emergent domains of thought that, in and beyond the modernist period, take a departure from the ground of rational knowledge and the transcendent principles; principles that are located in the long tradition of Western metaphysics. Many adherents to modern and postmodern thought and ethics construe their own position as a radical challenge to the long-time ascendancy of Western style metaphysics and, more specifically, grand ontological claims about God and existence. Though unpopular with some, a few critics of contemporary trends in philosophical and ethical thought have drawn a cultural and historical parallel between postmodern thought and the indeterminacy of contemporary capitalist markets. Spirituality and Dialectics contends that contemporary thought's wholesale rejection of the historic claims of dialectics and also a rational metaphysics that attempts to explain and rightly order human action-in favor of a fragmented anti-ontology-is at once a means of reinforcing the market order and, further, an attempt by bourgeoisie thinkers to hegemonize the domain of all critical thought. More specifically, this book argues that any possible critique of the market order and the market allocation of resources presupposes a substantive doctrine of the Good and that effective action on behalf of justice presupposes hope, and thus the conviction that the universe generally, and human history in particular, are ultimately meaningful. This book offers a fresh and interesting discussion of the dialectical tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Ibn Rusd, Hegel, and Marx. It, also, simultaneously critiques the interlocutors of metaphysics and dialectical metaphysics from the medieval Augustinians, on through to Descartes Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Spirituality and Dialectics also engages with the philosophical rubrics of epistemology, philosophy of