William Desmond’s Philosophy between Metaphysics, Religion, Ethics, and Aesthetics Thinking Metaxologically

This volume collects seventeen new essays by well-established and junior scholars on the philosophical relevance of metaxological philosophy and its main proponent, William Desmond. The volume mines metaxological thought for its salience in contemporary discussions in Continental philosophy, specifically in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and aesthetics. Among others, topics under discussion include the goodness of being, the existence and nature of God, and the aesthetic dimensions of human becoming. Interest in metaxological philosophy has been on the rise in recent years, and this volume provides both a practical introduction and thorough engagements with it by experts in the field. The volume concludes with a series of responses by William Desmond on the issues raised by the contributors.

1. Introduction.- 2. Number and the Between, by John Milbank.- 3. True Being and Being True: Metaxology and the Retrieval of Metaphysics, by D.C. Schindler.- 4.  Hermeneutical Selving as Metaxological Selving: Bridging the Perceived Gap between Theological Hermeneutics and Metaphysics, by Daniel Minch.- 5.  Metaxology and New Realist Philosophy, by Sandra Lehmann.- 6. The Metaxology of the Divine Names, by Brendan Thomas Sammon.- 7. Metaxologizing Our God-Talk: Desmond, Kearney, and the Divine Between, by Mark F. Novak.- 8. Espousing Intimacies: Mystics and the Metaxological, by Patrick Ryan Cooper.- 9. Evil: From Phenomenology to Thought, by Cyril O’Regan.- 10. Retrieving the Primal Ethos of Life: (Bio)Ethics in the Love of Being, by Roberto Dell’Oro.- 11. Silence, Excess, and Autonomy, by Dennis Vanden Auweele.- 12. Reactivating Christian Metaphysical Glory in the Wake of its Eclipse: William Desmond contra Giorgio Agamben, by Philip Gonzales.- 13.The Real and the Glitter: Apropos William Desmond’s Hegel’s God, by Sander Griffioen.- 14. Transcendence in Metaxology and Sophiology, by Josephien van Kessel.- 15. Panentheism and Hegelian Controversies, by Philip A. Gottschalk.- 16. The Gift of Creation, by Richard Kearney.- 17. On Speaking the Amen: Augustinian Soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Metaxu, by Renée Kohler-Ryan.- 18. Metaxology and Environmental Ethics: On the Ethical Response to the Aesthetics of Nature as Other in the Between, by Alexandra Romanyshyn.- 19. Responding Metaxologically, by William Desmond.

Dennis Vanden Auweele is a postdoctoral researcher (FWO) at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer’s Pessimism (2017) and Pessimism in Kant’s Ethics and Rational Religion (forthcoming).