Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology (Reinventing Critical Theory)

How does a philosophical approach to anthropology illuminate the traditionally philosophical topic of ontology, redefine what modern, Western ontology is in practice, and offer the beginnings of a new ontological pluralism? On a planet that is increasingly becoming a single, metaphysically homogeneous world, anthropology remains one of the few disciplines that recognizes that being has been thought with very different concepts and can still be rendered in terms quite different than those placed on it today. Yet despite its critical acuity, even the most philosophically oriented anthropology often remains segregated from philosophical discussions aimed at rethinking such terms. What would come of an anthropology more fully committed to being a source of (post-)philosophical concepts? What would happen to philosophy if it began to think with and through these concepts? How, finally, might a comparison of these two projects occur? This book takes up these questions and approaches them from the basis that 'philosophy' as such has been displaced by quasi- and sometimes even anti-philosophical modes of thought, from critical theory to psychoanalysis. An international and interdisciplinary team of theorists explore how the anthropology/philosophy conjuncture in question revitalizes French theory and leads to a new form of critical thinking.