Abstract

This book is a broad in conception and import as the title suggests. It argues that professional philosophy, even in its most technical aspects, bears directly and indirectly on fundamental social and personal concerns. Philosophy in the modern world is both symptom and cause of the deterioration of sustaining values and attitudes, personal and social, which mark the alienation of our age. This alienation or malaise finds expression in art, literature, social criticism as well as in the demise of basic institutions. This spiritual blight has its basis, according to Adams, in a set of false assumptions about the powers of the mind and the possibility of knowledge regarding the central humanistic categories of value and meaning. These faulty assumptions are part of the fabric of naturalism understood as the view that "it is only through sensory experience under scientific refinement and thought grounded therein that we acquire knowledge of the world and that reality is structured as it is conceptually delineated in philosophically clarified scientific thought". Over against naturalism, Adams argues for realistic, objective accounts of value and meaning.