Abstract

Man’s rational practice requires an intelligible and affirmable world, but as composed of the elements of metaphysical dualism, such a world is either arbitrary as a concatenation of meanings willfully projected on natural bodies, or an illusion to be absorbed into the actual but meaningless being of natural matter. The project of phenomenological ontology bears on the "future orientation of our civilization" because it aims to reconstruct a familiar world for man from the "broken totality" shattered by metaphysical dualism. Fell places Heidegger and Sartre at the forefront of this project.