Being and Other Realities Book

Metaphysics, with ontology and epistemology recombined, is profoundly revived in summary of a life of seeking a conceptual structure.

While the Big Bang was one ontology, the impression on thinking about this book, is that life was a second Big Bang, with nothing preceding it and every thing meaningful after. While the physical universe is in energy and matter, the latter in particles, atoms, chunks, and long lived helium bombs or black holes, with all of these affected by gravity over time, life while not overcoming thermodynamics globally, does so locally by storing information in chemistry, the genome, nerves, images and internet and using that to manage energy and with that matter. If life is the connection between data and what now, it is also the maker of meaning. A conceptually parallel view is that life, however primitive, is the first meta-level above matter and energy, and upon that other ways of being are built, perhaps eventually reaching the humane.

This book is supplemented by 28 critical essays, well curated, in the Library of Living Philosophers Volume XXII. While in the mode of modern expositors of philosophy, it explores the many interconnections with a breadth of thinking.