John O'loughlin

The Virtuous Circles John O'loughlin First edition

This title in John O'Loughlin's ever-advancing oeuvre achieves a comprehensive understanding and delineation of both the convolutional realities of female hegemonic contexts, regarded as vicious circles, and the involutional realities or, rather, idealities of male hegemonic contexts, regarded as virtuous circles, and therefore as bearing upon the title in terms of a positive alternative to and solution of the problem, from a male standpoint, of the 'vicious circles' which are established whenever somatic freedoms take precedence over their psychic counterparts, as in all heathenistic or, in contemporary parlance, secular societies. It is also notable in its understanding of the distinctions between binding and pseudo-freedom as a precondition of genuine freedom, whether for better, in respect of psyche, or for worse, in respect of soma. There is even a certain religiously-oriented terminological comprehensiveness, mirroring the above-mentioned circles, which appears to do maximum justice to the various metaphors which are convenient shorthand for gender and class realities and idealities in both sensuality and sensibility, thereby leaving absolutely no room for doubt as to the significance and status of such metaphorical terms, irrespective as to which stage of life, from cosmic to suprahuman (cyborg), they can be variously applied. Consequently there should be no doubt as to the applicability or significance of these definitions, or of how to distinguish between them on an underlying descriptive basis. In that respect, this project seems to achieve a logical definitiveness and may justifiably be regarded as the intellectual culmination-point of the author's philosophical oeuvre to-date.