The book tackles these questions as well as others concerning the use of causality in the sciences.

The publication of Form and Object: A Treatise on Things by Tristan Garcia, Prix de Flore-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, and screenwriter is a genuine event in the history of philosophy. Situating this event within classical, modern, and contemporary dialectical space, Jon Cogburn evaluates Garcia's metaphysics, differential ontology, and militant anti-reductionism through a series of seemingly incompatible oppositions concerning: substance and process, analysis and dialectic, simple and whole, and discovery and creation. Cogburn also includes a critical assessment of the consequences of (...) Garcia's philosophy, the various unresolved problems in his treatise, and the future prospects of speculative metaphysics. (shrink)

In this essay I articulate and defend a thesis about the nature of morality called “the embodiment thesis”. The embodiment thesis states that moral values underdetermine the obligations and entitlements of individual persons, and that actual social institutions must embody morality by specifying these moral relations. I begin by presenting two thought experiments that elucidate and motivate the embodiment thesis. I then proceed by distinguishing the embodiment thesis from a Rawlsian doctrine about the nature of justice, from the doctrine of (...) moral relativism, and from solutions to the coordination problem of rational choice theory. (shrink)