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Inexhaustibility and Human Being
An Essay on Locality
At a time when the metaphysical tradition is being called profoundly into question by proponents of pragmatism and continental philosophy, Inexhaustibility and Human Being examines a specific aspect of metaphysics: the nature of being human, acknowledging the force of these critiques and discussing their ramifications.
Exploring the possibility of a systematic metaphysics that acknowledges the limits of every thought, the book offers a metaphysics of human being based on locality and inexhaustibility. Its major focus is on a corresponding "anthropology" in which human being is both local and exhaustive – that is, based on limitation and on the limitation of limitation.
Among the book’s major topics are: being as locality and inexhaustibility; human being as judgment and perspective; knowing and reason as query; language and meaning as semasis; emotion; sociality; politics; life and death.
Clearly written, and wide-ranging in scope, Inexhaustibility and Human Being covers a multitude of subjects – history, love, sexuality, consciousness, suffering, the body, instrumentality, government, and law – in the development of its thesis. The book will appeal not only to philosophers – but also to those involved in studying the various arenas of human activity Professor Ross examines.
Ross (SUNY, Binghamton) has written a somewhat idiosyncratic treatise that extends his earlier work in metaphysics (Transition to an Ordinal Metaphysics, CH, Feb'81) toward a comprehensive theory of human existence. The author's overall project takes its point of departure from the notion of indeterminateness as it figures centrally both in the American pragmatist and in the contemporary Continental anti-foundationalist traditions. Ross suggests a plan to universalize the epistemological concept of indeterminateness, turning it into a pervasive feature of reality referred to under the term "inexhaustibility." For Ross, "inexhaustibility" captures both the finiteness of being and its complementary openness to determinations. In developing this neo-existentialist ontological framework into a philosophical anthropology, Ross interprets inexhaustibility as "locality"; being is understood functionally, as the ever unstable result of multiple relations. The central notion of locality is then brought to bear on such traditional anthropological topics as emotion, sociality, life, and death. The book is difficult to read and even more difficult to judge in its merits as a reontologized descendant of earlier existentialist anthropology. Graduate level.——Choice