What We Are: A Personal Philosophy for the Age of Science - Volume II - The Integrated Life - Hardcover

What We Are: The Integrated Life is the second volume of an original philosophical system. Where Volume I establishes the metaphysics - what reality is, what consciousness is, what time and identity and causation are - this volume turns the same two axioms toward the questions that cannot be deferred: how should one live, what is worth caring about, and what makes a life add up to anything.

From the framework of Integrative Dual-Aspect Monism, Volume II derives a substantive ethics grounded in the structure of consciousness itself, an account of beauty as integrative resonance, a theory of political justice built from the inside-out fact of subjective experience, and a treatment of meaning that neither dissolves into pure subjectivity nor pretends to cosmic guarantees. Each conclusion is tested against its sharpest critics - Rawls, Nozick, Camus, Nagel, Frankfurt - before it is allowed to stand.

The volume closes with a long meditation on death, written from inside a career that returns to it daily. The Walter Drummond chapter follows a single patient across eight years and three procedures, ending with the only sentence in the book Vonnegut would recognize.

This is the practical half of the system: what the metaphysics is for. For readers who came to Volume I for the theory and stayed for the question of what to do with their one finite, integrated, conscious life. Reading Volume I first is recommended but not required.

For readers of Derek Parfit, Iris Murdoch, Viktor Frankl, and Thomas Nagel.