 | Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: A Weak Nature Alone Subjects: Materialism; Philosophy of nature; Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1770–1831; Marx Karl 1818–1883; Lacan Jacques 1901–1981; McDowell John 1942–; Adrian Johnston's trilogy Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism aims to forge a thoroughly materialist yet antireductive theory of subjectivity. In this second volume, A Weak Nature Alone , Johnston focuses on the philosophy of nature required for such a theory. This volume is guided by a fundamental question: How must nature be rethought so that human minds and freedom do not appear to be either impossible or inexplicable within it? Asked differently: How must the natural world itself be structured such that sapient subjects in all their distinctive peculiarities emerged from and continue to exist within this world? In A Weak Nature Alone , Johnston develops his transcendental materialist account of nature through engaging with and weaving together five main sources of inspiration: Hegelian philosophy, Marxist materialism, Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology, Anglo-American analytic neo-Hegelianism, and evolutionary theory and neurobiology. Johnston argues that these seemingly (but not really) strange bedfellows should be brought together so as to construct a contemporary ontology of nature. Through this ontology, nonnatural human subjects can be seen to arise in an immanent, bottom-up fashion from nature itself. ADRIAN JOHNSTON is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of seven books, including Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive , Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity , Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy , all published by Northwestern University Press. |
