Contemporary American life is tinged with dissatisfaction. Increased wealth and comfort and technological advances have not made individuals happier or society more companionable. Today Americans marry later or not at all, and they fail at marriage as often as they succeed. Man and Nature in God is a story of contemporary American decadence, a grim tale of our flagging relation to nature, a tale confirmed at the center of our sexual lives. Sandelands grounds his critique in a modern philosophical error. We have conflated a ...
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Contemporary American life is tinged with dissatisfaction. Increased wealth and comfort and technological advances have not made individuals happier or society more companionable. Today Americans marry later or not at all, and they fail at marriage as often as they succeed. Man and Nature in God is a story of contemporary American decadence, a grim tale of our flagging relation to nature, a tale confirmed at the center of our sexual lives. Sandelands grounds his critique in a modern philosophical error. We have conflated a particular metaphysical outlook--the subjective standpoint of science--with our relationship, as humans, to nature. We fail to see that however much we may learn about nature by treating it as object to our subject, we cannot in this way learn what we most want and most need to know about nature and about ourselves. Answers to such questions as "How are we related to nature?" and "How are we to think and act truly in nature" continue to elude us.Cast as ideology by the "isms" of humanism, naturalism, and postmodernism, today's subjective standpoint has turned the question of truth into one question of politics. The unhappy result has been and continues to be a profound and deadly misunderstanding of nature as well as man, epitomized in contemporary American culture today. Taking this as his starting point, Sandelands suggests how we can save ourselves from our mortifying philosophical error, thereby claiming our true relation to nature, and reinvigorating our sexual lives. He identifies the need for a natural philosophy that takes God to be the starting point of self-understanding.Although the book is about philosophy, it is not only for the academic philosopher. Although it is about theology, it is not only for the theologian or student of religion. And although the book takes modern biological and social sciences to task, it is not only for biological and social scientists. Instead, Man and Nature in God is for everyone concerned about the dismal state of cultural life in America today.
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