Hegel is perhaps the modern philosopher par excellence of mediation, and his criticisms of doctrines of immediacy are worthy of consideration. I see his mediation as following a logic of self-determination, and this, even when his views are clearly open to an acknowledgement of the other to self. By contrast to Hegel’s self-determining dialectic, I offer an account of immediacy and mediation, and their interrelation, in light of a metaxological conception of being. This concept ion asks for the invocation of (...) a surplus givenness that is not the opposite of mediation, but rather than a mere indeterminacy, a set of determinations, or an inclusive process of self- determination. I draw on the account I have offered in Being and the Between. I also offer some reflections on how this approach overlaps with, and diverges from some phenomenological treatments of the matter. (shrink)

The book draws on the astonishing scope and depths of Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, exploring the multifaceted issue of art and the absolute. Why does Hegel ascribe absoluteness to art? What can such absoluteness mean?

INTRODUCTION Much attention has been devoted to the different tensions and conflicts between science and religion in the modern age. ...

The prelims comprise: Half Title Title Copyright Contents Preface List of Abbreviations.

This chapter contains section titled: The Angel of Death, Being as Gift God and Posthumous Mind Out of Nothing: Porosity and the Urgency of Ultimacy Redoubled Beginning: Elemental Yes Idiotic Rebirth Aesthetic Recharging Erotic Outreaching Agapeic Resurrection.

This chapter contains section titled: Godlessness Devalued Being: the Stripping of the Signs Idolized Autonomy: Eclipse of Transcendence as Other Transcendences The Antinomy of Autonomy and Transcendence Dark Origins and Transcendence as Other Will to Power and the Counterfeit Double of “yes” Return to Zero: Coming to Nothing.

This chapter contains section titled: The Way of Equivocity Nature's Equivocity God's Equivocity Equivocity and Evil Deus Sive Ego? on the Equivocities of Religious Inwardness Gethsemane Thoughts: Between Curse and Blessing Gethsemane Thoughts: Between Curse and Blessing Deus Sive Nihil? the Equivocal Way and Purgatorial Difference.

This chapter contains section titled: God Beyond Opposition Kant's Virtual Dialectic: Finding Direction by Unknowing Indirection A Parable: Fishing for God Dialectic Beyond Dualism: Determining Origin Beyond Determination Dialectic and the Self‐Determining God: on Some Hegelian Ways Dialectic, Coming to be, Becoming God Beyond Dialectic: ON Avoiding a Counterfeit Double of God.

This chapter contains section titled: Four Ways: God and the Metaxological The Indirections of Transcending in the Between God and the Between: First Hyperbole—The Idiocy of Being God and the Between: Second Hyperbole—The Aesthetics of Happening God and the Between: Third Hyperbole—The Erotics of Selving God and the Between: Fourth Hyperbole—The Agapeics of Communication.

This chapter contains section titled: What Has Philosophy to Do with Creation? Creation Beyond Univocal Intelligibility Creation Beyond Holism Creation, Coming to be and Becoming Creation and Nothing Creation and Agapeic Origination: Dualism and the “Not” Creation, Hyper‐Transcendence and Divine Intimacy Continuing Creation, Agapeic Self‐Reserving Creation and Arbitrary (Will to)Power Creation, Hyperbolic Evil and Trust.

This chapter contains section titled: The Hyperbole of the Agapeic Origin Bringing the Hyperboles Back to the Between.

This chapter contains section titled: Gnosticism and Religious Plurivocity Divinities Doubled Below and Above Gnostic Equivocity and the Fourfold Naming The Equivocal World as a Counterfeit Double? Passing Beyond the Counterfeit Doubles Agonistics: Divine and Human Doubling Back, Backing Out— Reversing Release Gnosticism and Metaxology: On Saving Knowing in the Equivocal Matrix.

This chapter contains section titled: Gods Religious Imagination and Porosity to Archaic Manifestation Sacred Namings and the Hyperboles of Being Naming the Agapeic God From Polytheism to Monotheism Metaxological Monotheism The Praise of Paganism.

This chapter contains section titled: The Idiotics of the Mystic God The Aesthetics of the Mystic God The Erotics of the Mystic God The Agapeics of the Mystic God.

This chapter contains section titled: Holistic Immanence and the God of the Whole Pantheism Contra the Worthless World Affirming the World and the Immanent God God and the Whole Holistic Emanation and Pluralistic Creation God Beyond the Whole? The Holistic God and Evil.

This chapter contains section titled: Personal God(s)and Plurivocal Manifestation Monotheistic and Polytheistic Personalizations Beyond Person, Beyond Mask The Gods of Philosophers: Masks of the Impersonal or Transpersonal?

This chapter contains section titled: God First Metaphysical Canto: God Being Over—Being Second Metaphysical Canto: God Being (Over)One Third Metaphysical Canto: God Being Eternal—Surplus to Coming to be Fourth Metaphysical Canto: God Being Incorruptible—Agapeic Constancy Fifth Metaphysical Canto: God Being Impassable—Asymmetrical Agapeics Sixth Metaphysical Canto: God Being Absolute—Absolved Agapeics Seventh Metaphysical Canto: God Being Infinite Eighth Metaphysical Canto: God Being (Over)All—Power Ninth Metaphysical Canto: God Being True—Agapeic (Over)All‐Minding Tenth Metaphysical Canto: God Being (too)Good.

This chapter contains section titled: Breaking Silence About God God and the Ethos of Being Passing in the Ethos: Between the Given and the Good God, Ethos, and the Fourfold Sense of Being God, Philosophical Systematics, Religious Poetics Exceeding System, Hyperboles, Unclogging Ways Structure of the Work.

Science can reveal or conceal the breathtaking wonders of creation. On one hand, knowledge of the natural world can open us up to greater love for the Creator, give us the means of more neighborly care, and fill us with ever-deepening astonishment. On the other hand, knowledge feeding an insatiable hunger for epistemic mastery can become a means of idolatry, hubris, and damage. Crucial to world-respecting science is the role of wonder: curiosity, perplexity, and astonishment. In this volume, philosopher (...) class='Hi'>William Desmond explores the relation of the different modes of wonder to modern science. Responding to his thought are twelve thinkers across the domains of science, theology, philosophy, law, poetry, medicine, sociology, and art restoration. (shrink)

A fate similar to Kant’s sometimes befalls Hegel: the importance of their meditation on art is not always given its full due. In Kant’s case the Critique of Judgement becomes an elaborate afterthought, filling some of the gaps left by the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. Particularly with English-speaking commentators, Kant is read from the First Critique forwards, never also from the Third Critique backwards. Hegel, we add, did not lend himself to such a unilinear (...) reading of Kant; yet his own concern with art is frequently subject to a similar consideration. Despite the fact that Hegel unabashedly ascribes to art a certain absoluteness, his reflections on art tend not to be placed close to the core of his philosophy as a whole. As in commentaries on Kant, so also with Hegel: towards the end of involved exegeses, we get a quick run-through of their aesthetic views, as if both too did write on these matters, yet somehow in a not central way. Art comes after the hard work is done, it does not shape their thought from the beginning. We may marvel at the astonishing breadth of culture displayed by Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, all the more surprising, given Hegel’s reputation as an unbending rationalist. In them we may find many rich reflections on art’s significance. Yet these tend to be detached from the general principles of Hegel’s philosophy, and praised or criticized in isolation. Even when due weight is given to the general principles of Hegel’s thought, and even when these principles are held to reveal something of art’s significance, the significance of art for philosophy itself tends to remain unexplored. How the art work enters intimately into Hegel’s ideal of philosophical thinking is not always entertained for the central question that it is. (shrink)

William Desmond's misgivings regarding Hegel's take on God leads the reader through Hegel's writings to reveal a path that leads anywhere but to God. The author believes that an idol is no less an idol constructed from thought as constructed from gold.

An original work which rethinks the question of God in a constructive spirit, drawing its conclusions by considering ideas received from both philosophy and religion. Makes an important new contribution to the ongoing scholarly debates surrounding the intersection of philosophy and religion Suggests that this junction is not just dictated by religion having to prove its credentials to rational philosophy, but that it is also a matter of philosophy wondering if religion is the ultimate partner in dialogue Includes discussion of (...) a wide range of significant thinkers, both traditional and contemporary, such as Plotinus, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche and his successors Completes a trilogy of works by William Desmond, complementing its companion volumes, _Being and the Between_ and _Ethics and the Between._. (shrink)

Articulates the necessity for a comprehensive reconstructive thinking about the meaning of being good.

This is the culmination of a systematic metaphysics written by a world-class philosopher, demonstrating the need for a renewal of metaphysics.

William Desmond - Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake - Journal of the History of Philosophy 43:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.3 362-363 Donald Phillip Verene. Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico's New Science and Finnegans Wake. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 264. Cloth, $45.00. This is an outstanding book written with elegance and verve, packed with erudition and delivered with wit. It offers insight into (...) both Joyce and Vico in their distinctiveness and in the mutual light they throw on each other. Verene outlines what is peculiar to his own approach in the following way. In the early part of the twentieth century the influence of Croce on the study of.. (shrink)

Seeking to renew an ancient companionship between the philosophical andthe religious, this book’s meditative chapters dwell on certain elementalexperiences or happenings that keep the soul alive to the enigma of the divine.William Desmond engages the philosophical work of Pascal, Kant, Hegel,Nietzsche, Shestov, and Soloviev, among others, and pursues with a philosophicalmindfulness what is most intimate in us, yet most universal: sleep, poverty,imagination, courage and witness, reverence, hatred and love, peace and war.Being religious has to do with that intimate (...) universal, beyond arbitrarysubjectivism and reductionist objectivism.In this book, he attempts to look at religion with a fresh and open mind,asking how philosophy might itself stand up to some of the questions posed toit by religion, not just how religion might stand up to the questions posed to it byphilosophy. Desmond tries to pursue a new and different policy, one faithfulto the light of this dialogue. (shrink)

Far from being pessimistic or nihilistic, as modern uses of the term "cynic" suggest, the ancient Cynics were astonishingly optimistic regarding human nature. They believed that if one simplified one's life—giving up all unnecessary possessions, desires, and ideas—and lived in the moment as much as possible, one could regain one's natural goodness and happiness. It was a life exemplified most famously by the eccentric Diogenes, nicknamed "the Dog," and his followers, called dog-philosophers, _kunikoi, _or Cynics. Rebellious, self-willed, and ornery but (...) also witty and imaginative, these dog-philosophers are some of the most colorful personalities from antiquity. This engaging introduction to Cynicism considers both the fragmentary ancient evidence on the Cynics and the historical interpretations that have shaped the philosophy over the course of eight centuries—from Diogenes himself to Nietzsche and beyond. Approaching Cynicism from a variety of thematic perspectives as well—their critique of convention, praise of natural simplicity, advocacy of self-sufficiency, defiance of Fortune, and freedom—William Desmond offers a fascinating survey of a school of thought that has had a tremendous influence throughout history and is of continuing interest today. _Copub: Acumen Publishing Limited_. (shrink)

"Rich in new and stimulating ideas, and based on the breadth of reading and depth of knowledge which its wide-ranging subject matter requires, _The Greek Praise of Poverty_ argues impressively and cogently for a relocation of Cynic philosophy into the mainstream of Greek ideas on material prosperity, work, happiness, and power." —_A. Thomas Cole, Professor Emeritus of Classics, Yale University _ "This clear, well-written book offers scholars and students an accessible account of the philosophy of Cynicism, particularly with regard to (...) the Cynics' attachment to a life of poverty and their disdain for wealth. I have truly profited from reading William Desmond’s book." —_Luis Navia, New York Institute of Technology_ William Desmond, taking issue with typical assessments of the ancient Cynics, contends that figures such as Antisthenes and Diogenes were not cultural outcasts or marginal voices in the classical culture of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Rather, the Cynic movement had deep and significant roots in what Desmond calls "the Greek praise of poverty." Desmond demonstrates that classical attitudes toward wealth were complex and ambivalent, and allowed for an implicit praise of poverty and the virtues it could inspire. From an economic and political point of view, the poor majority at Athens and elsewhere were natural democrats who distrusted great concentrations of wealth as potentially oligarchical or tyrannical. Hence, the poor could be praised in contemporary literature for their industry, honesty, frugality, and temperance. The rich, on the other hand, were often criticized as idle, unjust, arrogant, and profligate. These perspectives were reinforced by typical Greek experiences of war, and the belief that poverty fostered the virtues of courage and endurance. Finally, from an early date, Greek philosophers associated wisdom with the transcendence of sense experience and of such worldly values as wealth and honor. The Cynics, Desmond asserts, assimilated all of these ideas in creating their distinctive and radical brand of asceticism. Theirs was a startling and paradoxical outlook, but it had broad appeal and would persist to exert a manifold influence in the Hellenistic period and beyond. (shrink)

Desmond explores perplexity regarding ultimacy--the metaphysical perplexity that precedes and exceeds scientific and commonsense curiosity.

This book is a defense of speculative philosophy in the wake of Hegel. In a number of wide-ranging, meditative essays, Desmond deals with the criticism of speculative thought in post-Hegelian thinking. He covers the interpretation of Hegelian speculation in terms of the metataxological notion of being and the concept of philosophy that Desmond has developed in two previous works, Philosophy and Its Others, and Desire, Dialectic and Otherness. Though Hegel is Desmond’s primary interlocuter, there are references to (...) Aristophanes, Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. Desmond is concerned with the limits of philosophy. The themes of the essays include speculation and historicism, speculation and cult, speculation and representation, evil and dialectic, logos and the comedy of failure. (shrink)

Addresses the end of art and the task of metaphysics.

William Desmond sees religion, art, philosophy, and politics as essential and distinctive modes of human practice, manifestations of an intimate universality that illuminates individual and social being. By observing their permeable relations, Desmond captures notes of a clandestine conversation that transforms ontology.

This is a reflection on the gift of beauty and the passion of being in light of the fact that today we often meet an ambiguous attitude to beauty. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us. Bland beauty seems to be the death of originality. How then be open at all to beauty as gift? In fact, we often are disturbed paradoxically by beauty: both taken (...) out of ourselves, hence disquieted, yet awakened to our being at home with beauty. Beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away; we are more truly there with the beautiful yet taken outside of ourselves: both at home with ourselves and not at home, in being beyond ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. Our being disarmed by the beautiful I hold to be in tune with our being as marked most deeply by what I call a primal ‘porosity’ to being. Beauty sensuously communicates in and through this awakened porosity. We are a patience of being before we are an endeavour to be. In modern aesthetics and culture, originating receptivity tends to be downplayed as a depreciation of our claims to creative power. The predominant stress often falls on human autonomy, such that we love only what we construct ourselves, not what we receive. By contrast, I argue there is something of the godsend in what is truly beautiful. This might not be a fashionable way of talking but the vocation of the philosopher is not to be fashionable but to be true. (shrink)

William Desmond: It is a pleasure to welcome Professor Charles Griswold today. I thank him for his willingness to present us with an overview of his new book Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment , and to participate in a discussion. Professor Griswold is professor of philosophy at Boston University, where he is also the chair of the philosophy department. His new work on Adam Smith might seem like something of a departure from the concerns of many (...) of his prior publications. In particular I mean his writings on Plato and Platonic themes generally. I refer especially to his book Self-Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus, first published by Yale University Press, and recently reprinted by Pennsylvania State University Press.This book is a close reading and interpretation of the Phaedrus, and was awarded the Matchette prize by the American Philosophical Association in 1987. Needless to say, Professor Griswold has written extensively on classical philosophy. This, however, cannot be separated from a concern with pressing problems of more contemporary currency, especially the role of philosophy in society, and with respect to ethical and political considerations. Hence his concern with the moderns, by contrast with the ancients, implies no slighting of the former, though the question persists as to what both have to say to us today. So it is not surprising to find him engaged with a very influential modern, Adam Smith: an influential, but also complex modern, in that themes from ancient thought receive their own distinctive configuration in Smith's thought.Enlightenment is often marked by a certain turn from the past, oriented to a putatively better future, via a reformed or revolutionized present. But the contrast with the past is sometimes less stark. This one might guess perhaps from the subtitle to the book, emphasizing the virtues of enlightenment. While Smith now is often remembered first as an economist, Professor Griswold's interest is directed to his work as a philosopher, especially his moral and political thought. Many of the themes that Adam Smith explored, and to which Griswold draws our attention, are still very live issues: the virtues, ethical reasoning, sympathy, moral education, the importance of ordinary life and the role of philosophical theory, to name but a few issues.Let me then welcome Charles again, and ask him to first offer us an account of his new work, its purposes and its claims. After that we will begin the discussion with the other participants here. (shrink)

© 2016 by Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses. All rights reserved. I want to reflect on the nature of revelation by means of the idea of the "godsend". While seeming to be ordinary this word carries communication of what is beyond the ordinary. A godsend suggests something like a chink or crack through which something is revealed - a kind of gap, or permeability, a porosity to a light that comes from a source beyond. In that gifted porosity is there an opening (...) to revelation? Does the godsend say something about the surprise of revelation? In response I follow three steps: from word, to idea, to story. I begin by looking at the word and its etymology and consider what this implies. Then I look at the idea of revelation in connection with the claims of philosophical reason. Here my concern is to illuminate some theoretical considerations concerning reason and revelation, from the more reflective conceptual point of view, especially in relation to the modern sense of reason. Third, I turn to story as true to the godsend, and I pay particular attention to a story that witnesses to a kind of fidelity to singularity, the story entitled "Revelation" of Flannery O'Connor. (shrink)

Godsends is William Desmond's newest addition to his masterwork on the borderlines between philosophy and theology. For many years, William Desmond has been patiently constructing a philosophical project-replete with its own terminology, idiom, grammar, dialectic, and its metaxological transformation-in an attempt to reopen certain boundaries: between metaphysics and phenomenology, between philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, between the apocalyptic and the speculative, and between religious passion and systematic reasoning. In Godsends, Desmond's newest addition to his (...) ambitious masterwork, he presents an original reflection on what he calls the "companioning" of philosophy and religion. Throughout the book, he follows an itinerary that has something of an Augustinian likeness: from the exterior to the interior, from the inferior to the superior. The stations along the way include: a grappling with the default atheism prevalent in contemporary intellectual culture; an exploration of the middle space, the metaxu between the finite and the infinite; a dwelling with solitudes as thresholds between selving and the sacred; a meditation on idiot wisdom and transcendence in an East-West perspective; an exploration of the different stresses in the mysticisms of Aurobindo and the Arnhem Sermons; dream monologue of autonomy, a suite of Kantian and post-Kantian variations on the story of the prodigal son; a meditation on the beatitudes as exceeding virtue, in light of Aquinas's understanding; culminating in an exploration of Godsends as telling us something significant about the surprise of revelation, in word, idea, and story. Godsends is written for thoughtful persons and scholars perplexed about the place of religion in our time and hopeful for some illuminating companionship from relevant philosophers. It will also interest students of philosophy and religion, especially philosophical theology and philosophical metaphysics. (shrink)

This article explains some of the major intentions the author had in writing the book Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? It especially focuses on the question of transcendence, both with respect to the question of God as such, as well as Hegel’s option for a version of holistic immanence. It spells out some of the details of the book itself, and explains the guiding thread of the counterfeit double. The texts of Hegel may be saturated with the word “God,” but (...) in Hegel’s dialectical-speculative reconfiguration of God, what God comes to signify is devoid of the strong transcendence we find in Biblical monotheism. The strengths and deficiencies of Hegel’s position are explored. (shrink)

This is a special edition of Ethical Perspectives devoted to the issue of autonomy. While the issue of autonomy has its own particular form in Anglo- American discussion, the essays in this issue focus, in the main, on questions arising in the more continental tradition. The essay by William Desmond examines certain dialectical equivocities in the notion of self-determination. These are related to an underlying sense of valuelessness marking modernity’s feeling for the ethos, to a propensity to privilege (...) self over other in the process of self-determination, and to a temptation to evade the question of transcendence as other to human self-transcendence. These dialectical equivocities are explored especially with reference to such major thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. (shrink)

This paper offers two related refl ections on the questions of metaphysics after critique. The first is an analysis of the project of critique since Kant and its influence on the disputed status of metaphysics. It explores the theoretical and practical aspects of this by claiming that an understanding of thinking as negativity, whether in Hegelian form as determinate negation or in more radical deconstructive forms, lies at the heart of this disputed status. Not least, the relation of philosophy to (...) religion and to previous practices of metaphysics is at stake. The paper argues that there is more at work in critique than critique can account for through itself. In a second reflection, the arguments bearing on this “more” are explored in a more constructive spirit. On the basis of an account of the sources of metaphysical thinking beyond the resources of critique alone, the lineaments of what is needed for a metaxological metaphysics after critique are sketched. (shrink)

Can philosophy laugh at itself? Like Houdini I weigh myself down with chains, the harder to test my virtuosity as an escape artist. So I take the heaviest burden on myself: Hegel. If any philosopher was serious, Hegel was. But - to parody Nietzsche - here is the heaviest thought: Hegel had a sense of humor. My reader will think that already I am joking, but please do not laugh. I am deadly serious: Hegel had a sense of humor. I (...) will proceed seriously to substantiate this audacity to the logical concept by looking at the relation of Hegel and Aristophanes. Let me dampen any suspicion of frivolity or outrage to logical respectability. So I slip back into the tone of scholarly sobriety and purr: To my best knowledge, this relation is one of the most overlooked by commentators. It is also one of the most interesting for the following reasons. (shrink)

The writer of the below thought he would do something clever and out of the way. I tried to dissuade him, but without success. I told him that readers would prefer a more sober scholarly approach. I tried to appeal to his other work and his systematic proclivities. Why not try like Schelling to produce a system of freedom? He looked at me queerly. I was a bit taken aback when he burst out laughing in my face, and blurted out: (...) “You must not have read Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground!” I’m afraid he has spent too much time with the prodigals he has written about. He muttered something almost inaudible about Dostoevski’s double, but I said nothing.If I am not mistaken these pieces have to do with four great and very influential philosophers: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. To help the reader I have put the abbreviation K, H, M and N before each ‘monologue.’ In fact, I am not sure if the writer was mocking me: as if my sober efforts to talk of these four thinkers was being doubled with voices like and unlike; voices as if spoken from within, and yet said to have come from beyond; ego and alter; an odd twin of my scholastic sobriety. (shrink)