Thursday 12 April 2018

Yet Another New Book by Giorgio Baruchello!



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.

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