Materialism
TERRY EAGLETON 

Expanding his recent series of short, lively books from Yale on big topics (culture and the death of God are already in the bag), the former high priest of ­literary theory and now self-appointed scourge of “the commissars of contemporary cultural discourse”, Terry Eagleton, turns his attention to materialism. This is not, however, a Marxist assault on the imbecilities of consumer culture but a more bracingly philosophical discussion of materialism that demands a little more of the reader than those earlier books.

Eagleton is concerned with “the man of flesh and bone” rather than abstract idealism or what he sees as unproductive mind–body dualisms. His contention is that the body is the locus of all meaningful knowledge, the thing we think with and define ourselves through, and so: “To be a materialist in this sense is to invest human beings with a degree of dignity by seeing them as part of a material world which is identical with the Almighty.”  As a way of seeing, he argues, “it takes seriously what is most palpable about men and women – their animality, their practical activity and corporeal constitution. Seen from this standpoint, a good deal of philosophy looks like a suppression of the obvious.”