Finite Continuance, Selected Works, Ontology, Importance, Entitlement, Consumption, and Political Futures

This volume gathers the principal lines of the Finite Continuance framework into a single account. Its central claim is that the persistence of a finite being is not secured by the mere endurance of its present organization. Continuance depends on the preservation of the capacities through which that being can reconfigure itself, and on the preservation of the conditions under which further configurations remain possible. Continuance is therefore a provisional achievement. Its conditions can be eroded, depleted, or redistributed, and the distribution of those conditions is a matter of ethical and political concern. The volume begins with a foundational system. It sets out an ontology of finite beings, constitutive exchange, erosion, and provisional stabilization. It then develops a theory of reconfiguration that separates first-order capacity from reconfigurative capacity and modal meta-capacity. It treats possibility as a relation among modal openness, reconfigurational accessibility, and continuational viability, and it describes modal erosion as the contraction of effectively available futures. An ethics and politics of continuance follows, organized around cumulative harm, the threshold of sufficiency, capacity debt, capacity justice, the appropriation of future capacity, responsible suspension, and intergenerational responsibility. A critical section examines the framework against substance metaphysics, process philosophy, existential phenomenology, capability theory, and critical theory. Each central concept is given a working definition, a criterion of application, and a counterexample, so that the reader can test where the framework applies and where it does not. The argument is cumulative. The second part of the volume extends the framework to importance and care. Importance is treated as the way a finite being's situation bears on its continuance and on the futures it can keep open. The discussion argues that care is constructive when it preserves or restores capacity, that we cannot care for everything, and that the conditions of care can themselves erode. The third part examines entitlement. It analyzes the grammar of a claim, its sources in promise, need, desert, and gift, and the limits that protect the addressee from demands that would consume the capacities on which responsible agency depends. The fourth part applies the framework to consumption. It distinguishes price, utility, and existential importance, places the account in relation to Bourdieu's sociology of practice, and develops reconfigurative consumption as the regulation of exchange under conditions of limitation. The fifth part turns to political futures. It asks how political arrangements erode the conditions of their own revision, how the ethics of sufficiency applies at the collective scale, and how political life can be reconfigured without a final reconciliation that closes the field. Keywords: Finite Continuance; provisional stabilization; constitutive exchange; erosion; reconfigurative capacity; modal meta-capacity; modal erosion; capacity debt; threshold of sufficiency; capacity justice; appropriation of future capacity; responsible suspension; importance; care; entitlement; claims; consumption; reconfigurative consumption; Bourdieu; political ontology; political futures; intergenerational responsibility; future agency