Published by O Books 26 June 2009
ISBN: 9781846941856
Price: £24.99/$49.99
Paperback
Publisher’s Outline
This book is Nicholas Hagger’s main work of philosophy. It develops the thinking in his earlier philosophical works into a comprehensive philosophy of the universe.
It describes the world/universe in terms of One Reality, in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. (Whitehead said that the metaphysical philosopher endeavours to “frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of every element of our experience can be interpreted”.)
The book reconnects philosophy with the universe/Nature and will present the philosophy of Universalism as arising from the orderly universe of cosmology, physics, biology and metaphysical philosophy. Universalist thinking has applications in the environmental movement, political world government, religion, history and culture.
The book restates, and redefines, the metaphysical principle in our time as an experienceable ordering reality and as a system of ideas. It states the philosophy of Universalism in an accessible form. It is a book for the general reader and seeks to integrate all the disciplines – history, philosophy, religion, literature, science and the study of consciousness – into a single vision.
This book gives a comprehensive and complete statement of Nicholas Hagger’s philosophy of Universalism.
The Back Cover Says
The New Philosophy of Universalism challenges the Dawkins-neoDarwinist view of a random universe in favour of an ordered bio-friendly one.
At the origin of Western civilization, philosophy reflected the One universe and man’s position in it. In the 20th century, philosophy preferred to focus on logic and language and has become increasingly irrelevant. Universalism takes philosophy back to its original aim: focus on the universe – the universe known to contemporary cosmologists, astrophysicists, physicists, biologists and geologists, who identify systems of order as well as randomness. A systematic philosophy o the expanding universe, Nature and man, Universalism identifies a Law of Order that counterbalances a Law of Randomness and offers a new philosophy that has global applications. Excitingly, it reconnects philosophy to Nature and the thinking of the pre-Socratic Greeks and reunifies the universe and the scientific disciplines so philosophy can once again consider the whole of reality.
Comments
“The scope of Hagger’s book is immense. Universalism is a call to a philosopher to abandon the specialisms (in particular logic and language) and to attempt, once again, the kind of Grand Unified Theory of Everything that has marked the discipline from the beginning. Universalism has the potentiality to be as potent a movement in the 21st century as Existentialism was in the post-war world….Universalism is the most important movement in thought and art since Existentialism.”
Christopher Macann
Philosopher and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bordeaux
“This is one of the most important philosophical books to appear since Whitehead’s Process and Reality eighty years ago.”
David Lorimer
New approach
Nicholas Hagger’s books reveal truths that have been hidden. His philosophical Universalism brings a new approach to philosophy.
