The metaphysics of self and world Book

A great fissure occured in Western civilization in the early modern period with the divorce between the humanities and the sciences and the rise of scientific naturalism. The Metaphysics of Self and World is a philosophical exploration of the relationship between the individual, the culture, and the world. It is, in the author's words, "a philosophy of the humanities, a philosophy of humanity, and a philosophy of social reality." It explores the implications of a world-view that would integrate the perspective of the sciences with humanistic ways of thought.

E. M. Adams claims that we do violence to ourselves as human beings by trying to fit into the world as delineated in scientific categories. Rejecting cultural subjectivism and scientific naturalism, he argues for the irreducibility and validity of the categories of the humanities and for a fully developed humanistic philosophy of self and world. In generating this world-view, he utilizes the humanities as a source of culture therapy in order to close the fissure in Western civilization.

The therapeutic value of the humanities arises from the capability for critical examination and reconstruction. Adams uses philosophy to challenge the underlying assumptions of the modern mind, particularly those about our semantic and knowlegde-yielding powers. Building on an extensive critique of modern naturalism in two of his earlier books, Ethical Naturalism and the Modern World-View and Philosophy and the Modern Mind, Adams develops a full-fledged humanistic view of persons and society and a humanistic world-view. He argues that only such a humanistic philosophy will be able to overcome the modern human identity crisis and to solve the cultural contradictions between the way we must think in living our lives and the way we have become accustomed to think in our search for knowledge and understanding of the world.