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The purpose of these pages is to sketch the outline of an extended argument which links the various studies that make up this book. Ultimately, I wish to claim that there is a fundamental asymmetry between life and death — of, if you wish, between being and not being — which endows life's world with a moral orientation not reducible to the preference and/or the consensus of individual subjects. Contrary to the claims of radical scepticism, ancient and modern, I believe this asymmetry and this moral orientation enable us to claim that at least some of our assertions can be non-trivially true, independently of our assent. Or, in another idiom, I wish to claim that what is said can be true or false — and that what is done can be right or wrong — because, prior to our reflection, something is good, something is bad, and something is evil. Scepticism, I believe, is ultimately false because this is a value indexed, not a value neutral cosmos.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2614-6_21

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