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  • Being and Nothing: The Primordial Question of Philosophy

    Being and Nothing by Puntel, Lorenz B.;

    The Primordial Question of Philosophy

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      • Publisher's listprice GBP 140.00
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    70 854 Ft

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    Product details:

    • Publisher Bloomsbury Academic
    • Date of Publication 12 June 2025
    • Number of Volumes Hardback

    • ISBN 9781350503458
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages pages
    • Size 248x176x34 mm
    • Weight 1020 g
    • Language English
    • 700

    Categories

    Long description:

    In this masterful work, leading German philosopher Lorenz B. Puntel answers the primordial question of philosophy: "Why is there Being at all and not absolutely nothing?"

    Considering the history of philosophy from Parmenides through to Heidegger and beyond, Puntel charges philosophy with persistently failing to adequately confront the question of Being. In response, Puntel sets out a systematic philosophy to rival Hegel's Science of Logic and Whitehead's Process and Reality.

    In two parts, the book first surveys the history of Western philosophy through the theoretical framework of Structural-Systematic Philosophy (SSP), which unites continental philosophy's comprehensiveness with the precision and linguistic rigor of the analytic tradition. Analysing all of the major stages in the "forgetfulness of Being" in Western philosophy, Puntel establishes a dialogue with a vast number of thinkers and movements in the history of philosophy, including Plato, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francisco Suarez, Christian Wolff, Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, W.O. Quine, Peter van Inwagen, Kit Fine, Alexius Meinong, and Jean-Luc Marion. The second part develops the methodical question of a systematic theory of Being. Puntel sets out a universal metaphysics, introducing concepts of world, existence, and types of beings. Moreover, he examines the plurality of possible worlds, the disclosure of Being, and modern philosophies of subjectivity since Kant, including the analytic philosophies of Robert Brandom and Ernst Tugendhat. The book culminates in a theory of Being and explains the relation of Being to the concept of God.

    Being and Nothing is the third in Puntel's trilogy comprising Structure and Being (2008) and Being and God (2011), and is a book that will appeal to all those with an interest in the history of philosophy, continental philosophy, theology, and analytic philosophy.

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    Table of Contents:

    PART I

    Chapter 1. First metaphysical approaches: the development of ancient Greek philosophy: from Being itself to metaphysics as the science of beings as beings and to the dimension beyond beingness
    Chapter 2. Christian-metaphysical approaches in high- and late-scholasticism; from an inchoative Being-theoretical to a purely onto-theo-logical determination of Being and nothing
    Chapter 3. Leibniz and the question "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?"
    Chapter 4. Nihilism, critique of metaphysics, and the topic Being and nothing: Nietzsche and Heidegger
    Chapter 5. Sartre's The Being and the Nothing: a purely subjective phenomenological conception
    Chapter 6. The fading-out and absence of the question about Being itself and absolute nothing in the main stream of analytic philosophy
    Chapter 7. Relative nothing

    PART II

    Preliminary remarks
    Chapter 1. Essential components of the theoretical framework of the structural-systematic philosophy (SSP)
    Chapter 2: Systematic onto-logy as theory of beingness/beings
    Chapter 3. Possible worlds
    Chapter 4: Disclosure of the dimension of Being: a systematic approach
    Chapter 5: Making explicit the dimension of Being as the result of the overcoming of the modern philosophy of subjectivity I: Kant and Hegel
    Chapter 6. Disclosure of the dimension of Being as result of the overcoming of modern subjectivity II: Husserl and the transformation of phenomenology
    Chapter 7: Disclosure of the dimension of Being as the result of the overcoming of analytic philosophy interpreted as philosophy of subjectivity
    Chapter 8: Theory of Being I: basic features of a theory of Being as such
    Chapter 9: Theory of Being II: theory of modal status of the dimension of Being as the ultimate systematic clarification of the topic Being and nothing
    Chapter 10: Theory of Being III: systematic explication of the modal two-dimensionality of the dimension of Being

    Afterword: A look back and a look ahead
    Bibliography
    Index of names
    Index of subjects

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