FELIPE G. A. MOREIRA

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Usually, it is believed that upfront political conflicts like wars can be tackled from right or left-wing stances. But what about disputes in metaphysics, say, over essence? This book argues that these disputes can also be handled through right or left-wing stances. Indeed, disputes are micro-wars that implicitly have three features explicitly found in wars: significant social importance, presence of conflicting parties that pressure one another often through the use of violence, and dependency on normative factors. Ultimately, it is argued that a new left-wing approach to micro-wars has advantages over right-wing ones. The book supports that by promoting a dialogue between apparent unrelated interlocutors (e.g., Nietzsche and Carnap) and by spelling out a conflictual approach characterized by a critique of “subtle” violence. This violence, it is claimed, has been expressed throughout the history of Western metaphysics by all sorts of philosophical writings, such as Aristotle’s or Quine’s.