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Defining an "emphatic" as an intrusion that alters the import of what it intrudes on, Weiss sets the stage for an exquisitely systematic, speculative study of the major themes confronting modern metaphysics. The idea of an emphatic has its roots in Weiss's long-developed pluralistic ontology, with special focus on what we experience as an "emphasis." The most obvious examples are grammatical devices such as changed pitch in speech or exclamation and question marks in writing. Weiss also analyzes emphatics in etiquette, social status, nature, art, conventional behavior, encyclopedias, psychiatry, and religion.

Brilliant in every respect, Emphatics rewrites Weiss's systematic ontology in new terms. Not only are the lineaments of the system reexamined, but this book floods the reader with new perspectives and insights on relationship, signs, truth, particularity, space-time causality, education, mind-body issues, Being and other ultimate philosophical categories, and good and evil.

Weiss engages the various objections to his position in a series of question-and-answer epilogues at the end of each chapter that allow the reader to follow step-by-step a great philosophical mind at work. He takes his critics seriously, grapples with their objections, and answers them honestly. His discourse creatively revisits age-old questions and in reimagining new answers establishes the continuing relevance of philosophy as an academic discipline.