With a Preface by John Hirst

Imagine a world where the need for meaning no longer occurs; where we
are no longer driven to ask why we exist, or how right differs from wrong.
What would it be like to live in such a world? Could such a thing be
possible?

The need for meaning and the experience of meaninglessness are an
inescapable part of being human. Or so we assume. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Sigmund Freud and Richard Rorty take a different view. They see the
waning of the Christian dispensation as an unprecedented opportunity to
remake ourselves and to solve the problem of meaninglessness by
abolishing the need for meaning.

In this important book, Michael Casey analyses the solutions that
Nietzsche, Freud and Rorty provide for meaninglessness, and the new
world they would bring into being. Far from being a futuristic fantasy, it
may well be the emerging culture of the present.

Michael Casey is a sociologist on the staff of the Catholic Archbishop of
Sydney, and Permanent Fellow in Sociology and Politics at the Australian
campus of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family

Publication Date: November 2001.

"A world without meaning - a world without windows and doors - is uncomfortable, then stifling, and finally dehumanizing. Dissecting the modern academic penchant for declaring our world inherently 'meaningless,' Michael Casey points the way toward a truer, nobler humanism."
GEORGE WEIGEL: Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington DC.

"Fascinating . . . Casey's critique of Rorty is one of the most pungent and compelling I've run across . . . It is also an enormous relief to find Freud discussed intelligently rather than reductively."
JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN: Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago

"Casey writes with acuity and clarity which enables us to be taken with ease and with much illumination through a succession of complex and often ambiguous philosophical puzzles and stand-offs. He treats his writers and a mass of accompanying material with enviable skill and lucidity, and has made an important and original contribution to metaphysical analysis and exposition."
MAX TEICHMANN, Formerly Senior Lecturer in Politics, Monash University

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