ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a philosophy of life can provide a new conception of the good which can provide a useful framework for the resolution of political and ethical disputes.1 Building off Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault and Deleuze, it outlines what is central to life philosophy and how these thinkers can be represented as providing a new basis for normative political philosophy which avoids the consequences associated with the mechanical and deterministic philosophies of Galileo and Newton as well as the teleological organicism of the Romantics and Hegel. It goes on to explain how such an approach was developed by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and how life philosophy can function to steer evaluations which are genuinely cross-cultural, thus avoiding both moral and epistemological relativism in relation to the assessment of other cultures.
