Collected Philosophical Essays

As John O'Loughlin's mature works became increasingly aphoristic and hence, to his mind, increasingly metaphysical, with what he would regard as truth effectively eclipsing the fumblingly discursive nature of essays and, indeed, knowledge generally, he totally abandoned both the essays (as here) and the dialogues (published in a separate collective volume), together with such early aphoristic material that at least had the merit, so far as he was concerned, of anchoring him in a more genuine approach to philosophy than could ever be found in works of a philosophical nature diluted by prose and, hence, by a discursive want of both logic and system unworthy, in his estimation, of true philosophy. Nonetheless, the reader will be aware that philosophical essays are still distinct from literary prose, all the more so when, as in this volume and various others, the material has been centred, the better to intimate of a sort of metaphysical aloofness from the pedament-slaving world which customarily fights shy, in the angularity of its untransvaluated nature, of anything resembing, no matter how metaphorically, the curvilinear subjectivity of a dome, particularly when intimating, in true religious vein, of transcendental possibility, a possibility very much a part of the best of the essays included in this one-volume presentation, spanning the years 1977–84, of John O'Loughlin's literary output. – A Centretruths editorial