Ever since Martin Heidegger initiated the destruction of the Western philosophical tradition, we have heard that philosophy has come to an end; that metaphysics has exhausted all of its possibilities; that the history of philosophy terminates in nihilism; that we require “another beginning,” a return to the tradition of first philosophy, and a renewal of the question of being. For Heidegger, thinking in a postmetaphysical epoch therefore begins with thinking about being, with the consequence that our views about ethics or politics must first depend upon the meaning of being. Primal Philosophy: Rousseau and the Seduction of Happiness calls all of this into question.

This book presents the first account of Rousseau’s thought on the rootedness of philosophy in the question of happiness, while it simultaneously positions this account at the forefront of a larger effort to combat the nihilistic consequences of Heidegger’s decision to found the future of thinking on a radical return to the question of being.