Self Awakened

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is the Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard University.

Roberto Unger is one of the very few creative political philosophers of our time. The brief and broadly accessible The Self Awakened, which takes a distinctive position on one of the great questions of political philosophy and develops its implications for the political predicaments of our time, will serve as the best introduction to his complex work. For the brave band of secular humanists who do not wish to turn back the clock, this book represents an important contribution to an important conversation.

• The Philosophy of the Age Rejected Options The Perennial Philosophy and Its Enemy Pragmatism Reclaimed Pragmatism As a Starting Point Three Ideas of the Pragmatists Central Themes: Agency, Contingency, Futurity, Experimentalism Two Misreadings of Pragmatism Pragmatist Insights and American Mistakes The Core Conception: Constraint, Incompleteness, Resistance, Reinvention A Conception of Humanity Four Elements of the Conception Philosophical Attitudes Associated With These Ideas Time and Experience: Antinomies of the Impersonal The Source of the Antinomies The Antinomy of Time The Antinomy of Objectivity The Reality of Time: the Transformation of Transformation The Reality of Time The Thesis That Time Is the Transformation of Transformation The Thesis That Time Holds Sway Over Everything The Thesis That There Is No Closed Horizon of Possible Worlds The Thesis That Mathematics Is a Trojan Horse Within the Mind Against the Recognition of Time The Thesis That Human Experience Has an Inescapable Temporal Structure Self-Consciousness: Humanity Imagined The Imagination Disarmed in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Rationalization, Humanization, and Escapism Self-Consciousness Redirected An Initial View of the Mind The Initial View Developed By Contrast The Two Sides of the Mind From the Conception of the Mind to the Marking of a Direction What Then Should We Do? Conception and Orientation The Indifference of Nature: False Escape Will and Imagination The Manifest World and Hidden Reality The Conflict Between the Enabling Requirements of Self-Possession Self and Character Historical and Biographical Time The Prophecies of Art Society: the Perpetual Invention of the Future Politics: Democracy As Anti-Fate A Moment of Reform: the Reinvention of Social Democracy Religion: the Self Awakened The Problems of Connection and Transcendence Restated How We Encounter These Problems in the Course of a Life Existential Options The Two Awakenings of the Self Demands of the Second Awakening Philosophy: Beyond Super-Science and Self-Help First Digression: Nature in Its Place Second Digression: the Universal Grid of Philosophy Proper Name Index Thematic Index