ABSTRACT
Michael A. Weinstein's work represents one of the first interventions into finalism, a foundational philosophy that would inform border thinking in the twentieth century. Weinstein's brand of border thinking emerges from the margins of the American experience as a response to the global instrumentalization of modernity. His philosophical standpoint challenges the spread of global designs in the management of all planetary life and intuits that its main effect is the impoverishment of human life on earth. Border thinking uses finalist insights in its politico-philosophical stance against the bio political management of life in modern societies. The most famous North American finalist was George Santayana, who writes Weinstein in Polarity, thereby illuminating a transnational philosophical undercurrent that has penetrated classical American philosophy. In classical American philosophy, the wilderness stood for 'the mental space into which the philosopher withdrew in an act of separation from the moral conventions, cognitive assumptions, and the practical certitudes of the city'.
