Neofinalism

Description

Unfazed by the idea of philosophy ending where science began, post-WWII French philosopher Raymond Ruyer elaborated a singular, nearly unclassifiable metaphysics and reactivated philosophy's capacity to speculate on its canonical questions: What exists? How are we to account for life? What is the status of subjectivity? And how is freedom possible?

Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987) was a professor of philosophy at the Universite de Nancy. He was the author of over twenty books in French, including Elements of Psychobiology, The Genesis of Living Forms, and Cybernetics and the Origin of Information. Alyosha Edlebi is the translator of Theory of Identities by Francois Laruelle and Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction by Quentin Meillassoux Mark B. N. Hansen is professor of literature at Duke University.

"Raymond Ruyer's work is remarkably prescient and provocative, providing a profound philosophy of life and evolution that deserves to be re-read today alongside contemporary vitalisms and new materialisms. This is a significant text in the history and philosophy of science, skillfully translated by Alyosha Edlebi."-Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University "Raymond Ruyer is a rare, unsung genius, equally at home in the biological, physical, and technical sciences as he is in philosophy and the humanities. Neofinalism is one of those books that change the way we think. He draws our attention to the fact that matter and life are not just random collections but are matter directed by an ideal, a memory that informs all primary forms, all forms of consciousness. More than any other thinker, he opens up the concept of consciousness to all its inhuman ingredients and orientations."-Elizabeth Grosz, Duke University