Orphans of the One or the Deception of the Immanence

Through a collection of essays in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, this book explores the evolution of the idea of the One and Many.
Since Parmenides' dichotomy of One and Many, the One of the ancient cosmogonies has been reduced to a pole of our thought, a sterile identity which has been identified with truth but cannot bring forth nor give order to the Many. The author reflects on how the Parmenidean dichotomy has led, for many centuries after Parmenides, to the metaphysical attempts to reduce the Many to the One, causing unsolvable epistemological problems, and to the metaphysical dissolution of the One in the Many of time, causing the moral crisis of the West. Further, this study analyses the epistemic and spiritual impasse of the West and shows a possible solution to this problem: to unearth the forgotten dichotomy, the key to understand millenarian philosophical problems, such as consciousness, movement and causality, which are deadlocked because they all stem from the reduction of temporal phenomena within the framework of a rational thought which is unable to account for the non-identical.

Autorentext

Alba Papa-Grimaldi graduated in history and philosophy from the University of Naples, Italy, and carried out her PhD at the Department of Philosophy, University College London (UCL). Her thesis was developed into her first book Time and Reality, published in 1996. She also taught at UCL and was a lecturer at the University of Legon in Accra, Ghana. Her interests are in metaphysics and Orphans of the One represents a condensation of all her work on the subject over the last 10 years.

Inhalt
Contents: The Deception of the Immanence Consciousness as the One, Self-same Thought that Represents the Many Plato's Parricide: Self-identity from Ontological to Formal Principle Aristotle's Ontologization of Change: Many is Actually One The Return of the One to Thought A Phenomenal Theory of Causality The Presumption of Movement The Self-deception of Nihilism.