The Artful Animal
Human Nature in Retrospect and Prospect
Preview: The Prologue
At a projected eighteen chapters—which, taken together, are bound to comprise many hundreds of pages—The Artful Animal isn’t an essay in the usual sense of the word (i.e., it’s not “a short, discursive literary composition”). The original meaning of essay, however, was “trial, attempt, endeavour,” and that’s a description which fits my project well enough. I’ve been trying, attempting, and endeavouring to pull the thing off for several years now, and I’m likely to go on doing so for at least a couple more, God willing.
Although I’ve produced reams of rough drafts and research notes, the 50-page Prologue is currently the only section of the work that’s sufficiently presentable to merit sharing. Happily, the Prologue is also the section that provides an overview of the project as a whole. You’re welcome to read and/or download it in the PDF viewer below.
My plan is to add the chapters one by one, as they are completed, and post the updated document here.
Although I’ve produced reams of rough drafts and research notes, the 50-page Prologue is currently the only section of the work that’s sufficiently presentable to merit sharing. Happily, the Prologue is also the section that provides an overview of the project as a whole. You’re welcome to read and/or download it in the PDF viewer below.
My plan is to add the chapters one by one, as they are completed, and post the updated document here.
A FEW TIPS ON USING THE PDF VIEWER
- If you’d prefer to view the document as a two-page spread, select Even Spreads from the drop-down menu under ≫ in the viewer toolbar.
- To adjust the viewer’s height in your browser window, click outside the viewer and zoom in or out (in Windows and Linux, press Control and + or -; on a Mac, press Command and + or -).
- To adjust the document’s size in the viewer, click inside the viewer and zoom in or out (as above).
- I don’t recommend using the expand button in the viewer’s toolbar, which is a bit error prone; use your browser’s full-screen option instead.
Tags: Peter Brunette, writer, author, philosopher, philosophy, human nature, philosophical anthropology, ontology, cosmology, naturalism, dialectic, Artful Animal