John O'Loughlin

Black Sabbaticals John O'Loughlin

Few books can have undergone so many re-evaluations as this one, which has developed a fresh approach to terms which the author was apt to take for granted in recent years, never imagining that, one day, they would undergo such extensive re-evaluation as has transpired in this, arguably his most comprehensively exacting and philosophically significant work to-date, the overall significance of which is also due to the way in which certain antitheses, like life and death, heathen and Christian, energy and gravity, concrete and abstract, etc., have been interpreted from a standpoint owing more to philosophical logic than might at first seem to be the case, with highly credible conclusions that remind one that dualism, in one form or another, was always at the core of John O'Loughlin's approach to philosophy, even if the old class- and plane-orientated duality between noumenal and phenomenal, approximating to ethereal and corporeal, has here undergone a reappraisal which, relative to other such terms, renders it much less general and correspondingly much more particular, in relation, that is, to specific contexts characterized as being either phenomenal or noumenal or, in certain other permutations, as something else altogether! - A Centretruths editorial