Northwest Passage Books presents:
The Business of Life and Death
Volume One:
Values and Economies
by
Giorgio Baruchello
My previous two volumes for Northwest Passage Books were, basically,
philosophical explorations. Whether dealing with the traditional topic of death
(Mortals, Money, and Masters of Thought) or the less commonplace topic
of cruelty (Philosophy of Cruelty), the essays contained therein did
investigate, organise and make some sense of the vast legacy of the Western
philosophical canon—or at least they attempted as much. In the process, they
did not aim at achieving more than merely suggest that a foundational
conception of value might lie underneath it all. As this third collection of
essays is concerned, however, that first and merely suggested conception of
value finds finally full expression and open backing. In this book, as the
reader is going to find out, I am no longer exploring, but engaging in
philosophical advocacy. Life-value onto-axiology, namely the theory of value
that I had merely hinted at in the two previous collections of essays of mine,
is articulated and applied here to highly representative social dimensions,
while some of its implications for intellectual and economic history are
discussed.
As I look back at the years during which the
essays collected and revised hereby were written, i.e. between 1999 and 2016, I
realise how the diverse projects gathered and restyled for the present
volume—review essays, book chapters, conference papers, scholarly articles,
short notes—are all informed by my familiarity with, and tacit commitment to,
life-value onto-axiology, even though this theory of value may not have always
been the focus-point of each of them. Because of this realisation, I considered
using the technical expression itself in the title of this book but, following
conversations with Northwest Passage Books’ chief consultant, I concluded that
it would be unnecessarily abstruse and rhetorically ineffective. “Life-value
onto-axiology” is theoretically correct, but it is not consistent with the
spirit of this book. Insofar as the present volume is part of a project aiming
at making philosophy less ivory-tower-based and biased, fostering reflection on
what really matters in people’s lives individually and collectively, then
speaking of “the business of life and death” is equally correct and far more
immediate. It is what our existence consists in, in a nutshell. The subtitle,
“Values and Economies”, captures further the contents of the present book and
expresses the two main axes of scrutiny to be found in it by the reader, i.e.
what really counts (“values”) and what this recognition entails for concrete
social organisation (“economies”), not just their abstract representation,
which would be better labelled “economics”. So numerous are the works of mine
informed with the principles and concerns of life-value onto-axiology, that a
careful selection was made in relation to the present volume and an
additional one is going to be issued in the near future.
Available
from
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