Reviews for Being and Other Realities

The average rating for Being and Other Realities based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-29 00:00:00 Michael Downs Paul Weiss gives an interesting take on Being. He offers a content-level split on the domains of Being as a recognition that we cannot have a "flat" experience since so many facets of human experience today are incompossible, on different levels, that do not meet. Nonetheless, he carries with himself a strong notion of Kantian transcendentalism as a mark on how to appropriate Rationality and Dunamis. What he calls Dunamis is simply contingency, the actualization of being itself. In a way, I think he misses a more elegant picture, one that doesn't allow for a simple numbering of different domains through various kinds of relations, as he calls each marked by "Ultimates": "Voluminosity, Coordinator, Affiliator, Assessor" In introducing these terms, Weiss leaves it very vague. Perhaps these are explained in past texts, but he lacks a direct explanation here, and I for one would have liked more direct talk. It's great that he wants to bring Being back into the world of humanity, with culture and science. In this sense, he works as a kind of heir to Heidigger. Unfortunately, wanting to say something and being too aloof to say it doesn't help his argument. The main pull he makes that is different, I believe, to be his attempt to include agency: praxis, as one might call it. Much of what he says however is still too vague to be of use, and it's simply a translation of what we already know about the world into the philosophic terms he wishes to utilize. In a way, I was at times embarrassed reading this book because he tries so hard to be deep, that he mystifies his relations a little too much. I don't mind poetic language or mystification but I do not find it useful if you want people to utilize and fully embody the project as you wish to color it. Weiss however is right, that philosophy is a deeply personal endeavor, one fraught with difficult and self revelation. A difficulty in writing a book like this is being able to effectively convey what you want to say. He doesn't throw too much history of philosophy at you, or too much jargon, which comes at first as a relief, but very quickly becomes a failure of the book to explain itself better. What I got out of it was merely a reinforcement of traditional philosophy as I understood it. He needs to demonstrate the feasibility of his terms more as they differentiate and influence one another. Having 4 terms named as he does doesn't help, since he spends most of the book waxing about the different areas of human experience (nature, cosmos, individuation, culture and so on). His first chapter was very good, however.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-08 00:00:00 Armando Avalos 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.