Raymond Ruyer (1902–1987) was a professor of philosophy at the Université de Nancy. He was the author of over twenty books in French, including Elements of Psychobiology, The Genesis of Living Forms, and Cybernetics and the Origin of Information.

Alyosha Edlebi is the translator of Theory of Identities by François Laruelle and Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction by Quentin Meillassoux

Mark B. N. Hansen is professor of literature at Duke University.

Contents
Introduction: Form and Phenomenon in Raymond Ruyer's Philosophy
Mark B. N. Hansen
1. The Axiological Cogito
2. Description of Finalist Activity
3. Finalist Activity and Organic Life
4. The Contradictions of Biological Antifinalism
5. Finalist Activity and the Nervous System
6. The Brain and the Embryo
7. Signification of Equipotentiality
8. The Reciprocal Illusion of Incarnation and “Material” Existence
9. “Absolute Surfaces” and Absolute Domains of Survey
10. Absolute Domains and Bonds
11. Absolute Domains and Finality
12. The Region of the Transspatial and the Transindividual
13. The Levels of the Transspatial and Finalist Activity
14. The Beings of the Physical World and the Fibrous Structure of the Universe
15. The Neo-Materialist Theories
16. Neo-Darwinism and Natural Selection
17. Neo-Darwinism and Genetics
18. Organicism and the Dynamism of Finality
19. Psycho-Lamarckism
20. Theology of Finality
Summary
Translator's Afterword: The Ends of Thought
Alyosha Edlebi
Notes
Index