Metaphysics and Being Ordinary – By Samuel Phineas Upham

“The Metaphysics of Ordinary Experience” is an essay authored by Stanley H. Rosen. It was included in Samuel Phineas Upham’s Space of Love and Garbage. Stanley H. Rosen is Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy as well as a University Professor at Boston University and Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus at Penn State University. His books include Plato’s Symposium, Plato’s Sophist, Nihilism, The Question of Being, and The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, as well as, more recently, The Metaphysics of Ordinary Experience.

Here is the bio (above) from the essay and a quotation of my favorite paragraphs of the essay (below).

Everyday experience provides us with the only reliable basis from which to begin our philosophical reflections. Radical deviations from ordinary experience are indistinguishable from arbitrary constructions or even fantasies if they are not mediated by a careful exposition of their nature as responses to problems in everyday understanding. A construction having nothing to do with the everyday would, of course, be initially meaningless. Those who wish to begin their philosophical activity by an instantaneous departure from ordinary experience, as though they were shot from a pistol, as Hegel says of certain proponents of the absolute, must after all explain to us why and how they are justified in undergoing the immediate detachment in question.

To take a prosaic example, the recommendation to employ a new technical language in order to clarify ordinary English is accomplished via a meta-linguistic exposition that is largely ordinary. To go to the other extreme, even Heidegger prepares his readers for the new type of thinking with a few introductory pages on the origination of genuine problems from the everyday experience of things and the manner in which we speak about them.

Samuel Phineas Upham is a writer, investor and philosopher from NYC. Visit Samuel Phineas Upham website for more details.

If you want to but this book go to Ebay : Space of Love & Garbage – Samuel Phineas Upham