Acknowledgments

The thoughts expressed in this treatise began to take form in 1969 and since then have been developed in several drafts, the last of which was finished except for some minor additions and deletions in June 1983. I would like to thank the people who over the years have read and commented upon a portion of one or the other of the rough drafts, especially Richard J. Fallon, Gordon G. Globus, James Manns, and Howard P. Smith. I would also like to thank the three readers for Purdue University Press for their helpful suggestions about revising some of the drafts. Most of all, I would like to express my gratitude to three people who have extensively commented upon and discussed several of the drafts, and who have influenced equally the book’s final form: Peter Heron, Susan Ament Smith, and William F. Vallicella.

 Preface

The assumption that reasoning can be the only means of discovering a meaning of the world has been the guiding idea of philosophical investigations since the time of Plato. But for over a century now it has been apparent that this assumption leads to a nihilistic conclusion. Reason has been demonstrated to be incapable of comprehending such a meaning, and thus, if the only meaning the world is capable of. possessing is a rationally discernible meaning, the conclusion becomes unavoidable that the world is meaningless. It is this situation that makes it particularly urgent at this time to explore the possibility that there is another mode of access to a meaning of the world. It is the aim of the present treatise to develop the idea that feelings provide such an access, and that the world possesses a felt meaningfulness. It will be shown that feelings are distinctive in this regard, in that felt meanings are the only kind of meanings the world can be known to possess.

The development of this idea begins with an introductory analysis of the failure of the metaphysics of reason, and of the need for its replacement by a metaphysics of feeling.