This is the first ever philosophical novel. The third-most translated book from Arabic after the Quran and the Thousand and One Nights.
It has some commentary on Ibn Tufayl's philosophy of the 12th century. Immediately the author connects it to Descartes and Kant.
It's going to be a really good read and a really good look (I think) into fundaments in the evolutionary process of how humans conceive of the self. What are the common questions asked by Islamic and Christian philosophy? Then aren't these more fundamental ideals than capitalism? Can we back-calculate the evolutionary nature of philosophy in this way?
It's been something I've really flirted with. What order do ontological insights come in? How do they progress? What are the common threads of human thought irrespective of culture?
"They give me confidence that Plotinus was wrong about at least one thing: Our lives are not a “flight of the alone to the Alone.”" (intro)
So basically, we can divide the subject up by existential-material, sameness-difference. And then all we have to do is look at theories. Existential sameness versus existential difference. Material sameness versus material difference. Material conditions are mostly inherited (oligarchy) and existential conditions (meritocracy) are mostly not inherited. And this happens evolutionarily. And there is a physical procession of places that the human brain must punch through in order to get further and further ahead of itself.
Something like that.
There should be a study of reality construction based on hermeneutically common questions. Like... should we work on problems from philosophy in the Middle Ages to see how humans looked at life before all of the massive artillery and slaughter and slavery happened... Like... a theory of evolutionary agency: the hemispheres are not separate as McGilchrist alleges, but they were separate at one time and our brains are slowly adapting to this evolutionarily. It is like the fight between material and existential is what overlaps the hemispheres little by little. But there's always that blank slate. What is the lowest common denominator of humanness? A conscious being that acts based on weighing existential and material questions within a metaphysical (future) and historical (past) reality. Evolutionarily, there's this self-fulfilling prophecy that comes from existential curiosity versus material stationarity.
Freedom: the state of affairs where a person's historical conditions does not bias his / her chance of success / failure.
In order for maximum freedom, we must be gods to each other, always trying to perturb the status quo and create new opportunities. Peter Singer's philosophy is an existential necessity if we want to maximize the existential outputs over our lifetimes.
We want to know that we are wanted and that we belong. And sameness and difference are the two sides to that / those realities.