Abstract

My hypothesis is that achieving adulthood has been Russon’s aim from the beginning—in life, yes, as perhaps with the rest of us—but also in and as his philosophical development. To set up this claim, I show how philosophy has traditionally conjoined its own development with narratives of adulthood. I turn to important moments in Plato, Descartes, and Kant to set out the outlines of a given structure of maturation as found in the Western tradition, all to bring home how Russon’s writing tries to achieve something of an event beyond maturity as it’s been envisaged previously in these works.