Philosophy once aspired to understand the whole of existence, but the development of modern science has saddled it with seemingly impossible task of integrating an increasingly disenchanted realm of nature with the world of human meaning. In this book, Raoni Padui offers an elegant, historically rich assessment of the power, and the limitations, of the two greatest attempts to overcome the divide between nature and world without reducing one to the other—Hegel’s systematic reconciliation of nature and spirit, and Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics.

Mark Vinzenz Alznauer, Northwestern University

In this insightful and provocative book, a true historian of Western philosophy asks: Is philosophy—that is, life-guiding knowledge—still possible today? Raoni Padui’s Hegel and Heidegger on Nature and World synoptically situates the competing projects of the most ambitious modern philosopher and the most influential critic of modernity. Should we side with Hegel’s Promethean faith in an overarching philosophical reconciliation of natural fact and existential meaning, or with Heidegger’s Orphic descriptions of an inexhaustible phenomenological richness that overflows and so escapes every all-encompassing ontotheological system? Seeking to sublate this dichotomy, Padui critiques both Hegel and Heidegger and offers a more balanced vision that would preserve our best scientific insights without abandoning Western philosophy’s defining quest for a meaningful life.

Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico