The Contingent Universality : A New Ontology

There may exist something like the most unbearable of all philosophical thoughts.It is the thought of contingency and universality converging, intersecting, and being one and the same thing, approached from two different perspectives.Hardly anything is as unsettling as the insight into the absolute contingency of the emergence of universals, and the correlative realization that the only true universality is one of the contingency of everything.The goal of this book is to think this unbearable thought through to the end and face up to its most binding and disconcerting consequences. The history of science is full of theoretical unifications of two previously mutually exclusive concepts or two opposite realms (natural and unnatural motion in Galilei, terrestrial and celestial physics in Newton, man and animal in Darwin, electricity and magnetism in Maxwell, mass and energy, space and time, acceleration and gravity in Einstein, etc.).This book is based on the conjecture that what philosop