Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Preface to the Third Edition

Conatus is a Latin word meaning the will to live and the tendency for living things to grow and to flourish.

The ‘egocentric predicament’ is the idea that, as people, we can at most only be certain of our own thoughts. The external world and the minds of other people are unknown to us. So there is always a need to bridge the gap between our thoughts and our experiences of the world outside our heads. Over the centuries, philosophers have considered various ways in which the gap can be closed. Lacking any final answers from philosophy and science, we need to somehow close this gap ourselves, so that we can get on with the business of living.

In the original version of the book, I presented a series of essays, which I’d gathered up from several decades of writing, and set those down in more or less their original form. To these I added comments — expanding the contents of each essay with some additional information.

In the revised edition, I streamlined the writing and also added some further thoughts to the topics explored. The revised edition contains a lot of detail, and in this third edition I have tried to simplify things somewhat and get rid of many of the ‘isms’ that can cause confusion and that perhaps can be a distraction from the main focus of the work. (In fact I try to dispense with most of the ‘isms’ by Chapter 2.) I have also re-structured the book to a considerable extent and removed a lot of the content that relates to

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