The Metaphysical Club

Download The Metaphysical Club PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374706387
Total Pages : 569 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Metaphysical Club by : Louis Menand

Download or read book The Metaphysical Club written by Louis Menand and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2002-04-10 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Metaphysical Club is the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History. A national bestseller and "hugely ambitious, unmistakably brilliant" (Janet Maslin, New York Times) book about the creation of modern American thought. The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea -- an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things "out there" waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent -- like knives and forks and microchips -- to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent-- like germs -- on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea deps not on its immutability but on its adaptability. The Metaphysical Club is written in the spirit of this idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a story about America. It begins with the Civil War and s in 1919 with Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion in the case of U.S. v. Abrams-the basis for the constitutional law of free speech. The first four sections of the book focus on Holmes, James, Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. The last section discusses some of the fundamental twentieth-century ideas they are associated with. This is a book about a way of thinking that changed American life.

The Metaphysical Club

Download The Metaphysical Club PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
ISBN 13 : 0007126905
Total Pages : 563 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Metaphysical Club by : Louis Menand

Download or read book The Metaphysical Club written by Louis Menand and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2002 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Metaphysical Club was a group that met in Massachusetts, in 1872. The group believed that ideas are not things out there waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent to make their way in the world. This book is the story of that idea.

The Metaphysical Club

Download The Metaphysical Club PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374528497
Total Pages : 569 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (745 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Metaphysical Club by : Louis Menand

Download or read book The Metaphysical Club written by Louis Menand and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-04-10 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the development of an American philosophy between the end of the Civil War and 1919 by exploring the lives of four key metaphysical thinkers: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey.

The Free World

Download The Free World PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374722919
Total Pages : 880 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Free World by : Louis Menand

Download or read book The Free World written by Louis Menand and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post "The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." —David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice One of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Mother Jones best book of 2021 In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.

The Real Metaphysical Club

Download The Real Metaphysical Club PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438473265
Total Pages : 476 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Real Metaphysical Club by : Frank X. Ryan

Download or read book The Real Metaphysical Club written by Frank X. Ryan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A full account of the Metaphysical Club, featuring the members’ philosophical writings and four critical essays. The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America’s distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand’s bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James—appear in the book, alongside other thinkers who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the full story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains the important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors’ three introductions to the volume’s sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought of the Metaphysical Club. Frank X. Ryan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University and the author of Seeing Together: Mind, Matter, and the Experimental Outlook of John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley. Brian E. Butler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Asheville and the author of The Democratic Constitution: Experimentalism and Interpretation. James A. Good is Dean of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Business, and Economics Division at Lone Star College-North Harris. He is the coeditor (with John R. Shook) of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel.

Discovering Modernism

Download Discovering Modernism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199774714
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Discovering Modernism by : Louis Menand

Download or read book Discovering Modernism written by Louis Menand and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Discovering Modernism was first published, it shed new and welcome light on the birth of Modernism. This reissue of Menand's classic intellectual history of T.S. Eliot and the singular role he played in the rise of literary modernism features an updated Afterword by the author, as well as a detailed critical appraisal of the progression of Eliot's career as a poet and critic. The new Afterword was adapted from Menand's critically lauded essay on Eliot in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume Seven: Modernism and the New Criticism. Menand shows how Eliot's early views on literary value and authenticity, and his later repudiation of those views, reflect the profound changes regarding the understanding of literature and its significance that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. It will prove an eye-opening study for readers with an interest in the writings of T.S. Eliot and other luminaries of the Modernist era.

Metaphysical Animals

Download Metaphysical Animals PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 1984898981
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (848 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Metaphysical Animals by : Clare Mac Cumhaill

Download or read book Metaphysical Animals written by Clare Mac Cumhaill and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A vibrant portrait of four college friends—Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley—who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away fighting World War II. The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war’s darkest revelations. Neither the great Enlightenment thinkers of the past, the logical innovators of the early twentieth century, or the new Existentialist philosophy trickling across the Channel, could make sense of this new human reality of limitless depravity and destructive power, the women felt. Their answer was to bring philosophy back to life. We are metaphysical animals, they realized, creatures that can question their very being. Who am I? What is freedom? What is human goodness? The answers we give, they believed, shape what we will become. Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a lively portrait of women who shared ideas, but also apartments, clothes and even lovers. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman show how from the disorder and despair of the war, four brilliant friends created a way of ethical thinking that is there for us today.

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time)

Download The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time) PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393062759
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (93 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time) by : Louis Menand

Download or read book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time) written by Louis Menand and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-01-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sparking a long-overdue debate about the future of American education, "The Marketplace of Ideas" examines traditional university institutions, assessing what is worth saving and what is not

I Wear the Black Hat

Download I Wear the Black Hat PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439184518
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (391 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis I Wear the Black Hat by : Chuck Klosterman

Download or read book I Wear the Black Hat written by Chuck Klosterman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman “offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero” (New York magazine). Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, has walked into the darkness. In I Wear the Black Hat, he questions the modern understanding of villainy. When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying, and why are we so obsessed with saying it? How does the culture of malevolence operate? What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don’t we see Bernhard Goetz the same way we see Batman? Who is more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson’s second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still haunted by some kid he knew for one week in 1985? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). As the Los Angeles Times notes: “By underscoring the contradictory, often knee-jerk ways we encounter the heroes and villains of our culture, Klosterman illustrates the passionate but incomplete computations that have come to define American culture—and maybe even American morality.” I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny.

Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902-1945

Download Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902-1945 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521890557
Total Pages : 628 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (95 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902-1945 by : Malachi Haim Hacohen

Download or read book Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902-1945 written by Malachi Haim Hacohen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-03-04 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2001 biography reassesses philosopher Karl Popper's life and works within the context of interwar Vienna.

The American Pragmatists

Download The American Pragmatists PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199231206
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (992 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The American Pragmatists by : Cheryl Misak

Download or read book The American Pragmatists written by Cheryl Misak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a history of the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism from its inception in the Metaphysical Club (Cambridge, MA) of the 1870s to present.

The Future of Academic Freedom

Download The Future of Academic Freedom PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421428598
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Future of Academic Freedom by : Henry Reichman

Download or read book The Future of Academic Freedom written by Henry Reichman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few issues are as hotly debated or misunderstood as academic freedom. Reichman's book sheds light on and brings clarity to those debates. Winner of the Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award by the American Library Association Academic freedom—crucial to the health of American higher education—is threatened on many fronts. In The Future of Academic Freedom, a leading scholar equips us to defend academic freedom by illuminating its meaning, the challenges it faces, and its relation to freedom of expression. In the wake of the 2016 election, challenges to academic freedom have intensified, higher education has become a target of attacks by conservatives, and issues of free speech on campus have grown increasingly controversial. In this book, Henry Reichman cuts through much of the rhetoric to issue a clarion call on behalf of academic freedom as it has been defined and defended by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for over a hundred years. Along the way, he makes it clear that this is the issue of our day. Over the course of ten audacious essays, Reichman explores the theory, history, and contemporary practice of academic freedom. He pays attention to such varied concerns as the meddling of politicians and corporate trustees in curriculum and university governance, the role of online education, the impact of social media, the rights of student protesters and outside speakers, the relationship between collective bargaining and academic freedom, and the influence on research and teaching of ideologically motivated donors. Significantly, he debunks myths about the strength of the alleged opposition to free expression posed by student activism and shows that the expressive rights of students must be defended as part of academic freedom. Based on broad reading in such diverse fields as educational theory, law, history, and political science, as well as on the AAUP's own investigative reporting, The Future of Academic Freedom combines theoretical sweep with the practical experience of its author, a leader and activist in the AAUP who is an expert on campus free speech. The issues Reichman considers—which are the subjects of daily conversation on college and university campuses nationwide as well as in the media—will fascinate general readers, students, and scholars alike.

American Studies

Download American Studies PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780374529000
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis American Studies by : Louis Menand

Download or read book American Studies written by Louis Menand and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Collection That "Represents The Heart of Menand's Work . . . And Demonstrates His Status As His Generation's Premier Critical Talent" (Los Angeles Times)

The Liberal Imagination

Download The Liberal Imagination PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590175514
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Liberal Imagination by : Lionel Trilling

Download or read book The Liberal Imagination written by Lionel Trilling and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-07-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas

Download The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : CUA Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813209838
Total Pages : 668 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (98 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas by : John F. Wippel

Download or read book The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas written by John F. Wippel and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a highly respected scholar of Thomas Aquinas's writings, this volume offers a comprehensive presentation of Aquinas's metaphysical thought. It is based on a thorough examination of his texts organized according to the philosophical order as he himself describes it rather than according to the theological order. In the introduction and opening chapter, John F. Wippel examines Aquinas's view on the nature of metaphysics as a philosophical science and the relationship of its subject to divine being. Part One is devoted to his metaphysical analysis of finite being. It considers his views on the problem of the One and the Many in the order of being, and includes his debt to Parmenides in formulating this problem and his application of analogy to finite being. Subsequent chapters are devoted to participation in being, the composition of essence and esse in finite beings, and his appeal to a kind of relative nonbeing in resolving the problem of the One and the Many. Part Two concentrates on Aquinas's views on the essential structure of finite being, and treats substance-accident composition and related issues, including, among others, the relationship between the soul and its powers and unicity of substantial form. It then considers his understanding of matter-form composition of corporeal beings and their individuation. Part Three explores Aquinas's philosophical discussion of divine being, his denial that God's existence is self-evident, and his presentation of arguments for the existence of God, first in earlier writings and then in the "Five Ways" of his Summa theologiae. A separate chapter is devoted to his views on quidditative and analogical knowledge of God. The concluding chapter revisits certain issues concerning finite being under the assumption that God's existence has now been established. John F. Wippel, professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, was recently awarded the prestigious Aquinas Medal by the American Catholic Philosophical Association. In addition to numerous articles and papers, Wippel has coauthored or edited several other works, including Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas and The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, both published by CUA Press. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "The quality of Wippel's historical research and interpretation and the detail of his argumentation make this a work that will have to be taken account of in any further studies of this topic."- John Boler, International Studies in Philosophy "A carefully and solidly argued presentation of Aquinas's metaphysics by a scholar of medieval philosophy and a superb metaphysician. It should stand on the library shelf of every student of medieval philosophy, sharing the stage with Wippel's other dependable works."--Prof. Stephen F. Brown, Boston College "In Wippel we have a master of medieval metaphysics who is at the height of his powers and who can bring to bear on this work of interpretation years of study, not only of Aquinas but also of the whole context of medieval metaphysics in which Aquinas thought and wrote. The result is a monumental work which will quickly become the definitive work on Aquinas's metaphysics."--Prof. Eleonore Stump, St. Louis University "Wippel proposes to 'set forth Thomas Aquinas's metaphysical thought, based on his own texts, in accord with the philosophical order. . . .' This is a bold, even audacious proposal, but one that Wippel succeeds in realizing, thanks to his expansive and detailed knowledge of a field in which he has worked for more than twenty years. He has total command not only of the works of Thomas, of his sources, and of his earliest commentators, but also of the secondary literature of this century in English, Italian, French, German, and Spanish."--Gregorianum A] positively magisterial account of its subject

Pragmatism

Download Pragmatism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 568 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Pragmatism by : Louis Menand

Download or read book Pragmatism written by Louis Menand and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1997-10-07 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here are the major texts of American pragmatism, from William James, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Sanders Peirce to Cornell West, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Richard Posner, and Richard Poirier, now collected and reprinted unabridged. All are remarkable for the wit and vigor of their prose and the mind-clearing force of their ideas. They reflect the vital role that pragmatism has played in almost every area of American intellectual and cultural life, inspiring judges, educators, politicians, poets, and social prophets. Edited and introduced by Louis Menand, Pragmatism: A Reader is an invaluable resource--and an absorbing read--for everyone who is interested in American culture.

Metaphysics

Download Metaphysics PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Metaphysics by : José Amado Benardete

Download or read book Metaphysics written by José Amado Benardete and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This survey of metaphysics covers the historical or classical aspects of the subject as well as those currently in the post-Wittgensteinian limelight--principally materialism, platonism, essentialism, and anti-realism. Benardete sees contemporary metaphysical preoccupations as more or less thinly disguised revisitings of those of the past, and explains how metaphysics and mathematical logic are interrelated and how metaphysical studies can illuminate both scinece and the humanities.