The Measure of Things Humanism, Humility, and Mystery [Hardcover]

David Cooper explores and defends the view that a reality independent of human perspectives is necessarily indescribable, a mystery. Other views are shown to be hubristic. Humanists, for whom man is the measure of reality, exaggerate our capacity to live without the sense of an independent measure. Absolutists, who proclaim our capacity to know an independent reality, exaggerate our cognitive powers. In this highly original book Cooper restores to philosophy a proper appreciation of mystery-that is what provides a measure of our beliefs and conduct.

Preface
1. Introduction
2. Self-assertion: from 'Ockhamism' to the Renaissance
3. Reason and Agency: Enlightenment, Kant and Romanticism
4. Prometheanism Unbound: from Marx and Nietzsche to Pragmatism
5. Existential Humanism
6. Interlude: Rival Humanisms
7. Belief, Posture and Humility
8. The Hubris of Absolutism
9. The Hubris of Humanism (1)
10. The Hubris of Humanism (2)
11. Mystery
12. Emptiness and Mystery
13. Mystery and Measure
Index

remarkable . . . an unusual and courageous book. Most striking, perhaps, is the originality and ambition of its overall conception, persuasively linking up a range of important questions not standardly seen as germane to each other . . . The overall position presented in this book is skilfully woven from these different strands of inquiry and the sheer range of philosophical learning exhibited in the course of it is genuinely impressive. In his generous, searching, and imaginative interpretations and reconstructions of a wide array of heterogeneous but, he argues, often converging sources, Cooper succeeds in presenting and exemplifying an attractive and humane vision of things. It is not the least of the significant merits of his book that it reminds us in the process that the quality of a philosophy lies as much in the questions it has the courage to ask as in the answers it ventures. --Mind