Will D. Desmond

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.

If we compare scholarship in English on Schelling and Hegel, what is notable is the recent abundance of work on Hegel, an abundance continually increasing, and the relative meagreness of work on Schelling. This is partly due to the decline of interest in the philosophy of nature in the nineteenth century, and to Schelling's reputation as an irrationalist obsessed with some of the darker enigmas of religion. Hegel continues to overshadow Schelling as he had come to overshadow him in his own time. There are signs, however, of some stirrings of a wider interest in Schelling. We might note Alan White's recent effort to reconstruct Schelling's system, and Michael Vater's discussion in his translation of Schelling's Bruno. Werner Marx's study of Schelling is a further contribution to this renewal of interest. This book is to be welcomed not only for the way it sympathetically presents Schelling as a thinker to be taken with philosophical seriousness, but also for the illuminating light we gain if we look at Schelling and Hegel together, and if we see the continuity of themes between Schelling and more contemporary thinkers.

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.

Often we attribute the sources of this contested place to Hume, and in a more qualified way to Kant. By contrast, Hegel is frequently presented as embodying a post-critical resurgence of metaphysics, a recrudescence of what seemed to have been safely stowed in its grave. True, one finds interpretations in which Hegel as metaphysician is subordinated to Hegel the true heir of the Kantian project. Nevertheless, Hegel's continuity with the prior tradition is so massively evident, and not least in his respect for the Greeks, especially Aristotle, that this interpretation has much to do with the commentators own embarrassments with metaphysics. Yet Hegel has been a contributer, sometimes witting, sometimes not, to metaphysics' contested place.

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..

© 2016, all rights reserved. The liturgy forms an important motif within Eastern-Orthodox Christian ecotheology. In this article, we will explore the manner in which the notion of the liturgical may be meaningful beyond a theological framework, to interpret certain spiritual experiences within the natural world. The philosophy of Jean-Yves Lacoste and William Desmond will prove key in clarifying different aspects of what will be called a liturgical-metaxological experience of nature. The ontological gratitude, originating from such experiences, may engender transformational processes fostering an ethics of generosity. Ascesis, closely linked to the liturgical, provides insight into the behavioural changes made in view of the communion of being. Together, the liturgical and the ascetic form a dynamics that appears to positively alter the discrepancy between environmental values held and actual behaviour, the so-called value-action gap.

Dialectic has a plurality of meanings which in some respects define the repertoire of possible ways of thinking offered to us by the philosophical tradition. These meanings range from dialectic’s identification with specious reasoning to a method for dissolving specious reasoning. They include its all but identification with logic, as in the Middle Ages, Kant’s view of dialectic in relation to the critique of illusion, when reason strays into contradiction in treating of transcendental objects. They include the Hegelian notion of dialectic as articulating the process of development in being and in mind. Hegel’s successors, Marx notably, apply dialectic to historical process, as does Hegel himself. Dialectic is viewed with suspicion, both by analytical philosophers who often identify it with specious reasoning, pseudo-thinking, and by many of Hegel’s Continental successors who are critical of its imputed totalistic imperialism, an imperialism also imputed to the entire tradition of metaphysics. There are other senses of dialectic connected to Socratic maieutic, to the description of the highest philosophical thinking in Plato’s Republic, to the diaeretic method of the Sophist.

Richard Taft’s discussion focuses on the undoubted fact that a shift occurs in Hegel’s attitude to art. This shift served to put increasing distance between him and the approaches of Schelling and Hölderlin to the issue. Hegel became the defender of the supremacy of philosophy against any Romantic effort to assert art’s superiority, also against the traditional theological subordination of philosophy to religion. It is clear, and Taft is helpful here, that the younger Hegel was not insistent on the primacy of philosophy in this sense. Taft helps us focus on important facets in Hegel’s shift: the cooling of Hegel’s youthful ardor with respect to the Hellenic ideal, the chastening of excessively utopian ideals, the shift in the function of art from the ancient world to modernity, and the importance of the systematic ideal in Hegel’s philosophical development.

The appearance in English of Hegel’s letters is long overdue. We can now thank Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler for the tremendous work of translation they have done in bringing the letters to us. In addition to this immense labor of translation, Butler has also contributed a very helpful introduction to this volume, explaining the general organization of this English edition of the letters and giving us a brief overview of Hegel’s life in relation to them. Butler distinguishes helpfully between a Neoplatonic, panlogist and hermeneutical reading of Hegel. In his introduction he focusses particularly on the contrast of the panlogist and hermeneutical readings, arguing for an open-endedness in Hegel’s thought which would make this thought more hermeneutical than panlogist. This is too large an issue to discuss here, and Butler has discussed it more fully in some other writings. He does, however, remind us of Hegel’s repudiation of the excesses of romantic subjectivity, seeing in Hegel’s tendency toward panlogism a polemical overreaction to the romantic cult of feeling. Whatever the relative merits of these different readings of Hegel are with respect to his systematic works, the hermeneutical approach will inevitably receive some support from a consideration of the letters. For since Hegel’s letters are the direct outgrowth of his life, with all its existential ambiguities and entanglements, they reveal a many-sided Hegel who is impossible to encapsulate in any closed system of concepts.

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.

It is a philosophical commonplace to juxtapose logic and imagination, reason and sensibility, the concept and intuition, philosophy itself and art. Frequently these pairs are thought of as opposites, one mediated through abstract reflection, the other a more intimate participant in the given of concrete existence. Philosophy does not always come off uncriticized in this opposition. Its reflective, analytical impulse is often thought to abstract us, remove us from the concretely real. Art, by contrast, it is said, serves to keep us closer to the particularities and richness of the concrete, and so to be justified in the greater immediacy of its appeal.

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.

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.