A Path into Metaphysics

List of Figures

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE: HUMANNESS, METAPHYSICS, AND BEING

1. Secular Meditations

Death
Birth
Embodiment
Consciousness
Self-Identity
Space
Time
Interconnectedness

2. The Many Dimensions of Humanness

Experience and Conceptualization
Flatland: An Imaginative Model
Imagination and Judgment
Intentionality
Sensing
Conceptualization
Reference to Being
Implicit Features of Inwardness

3. Toward a Definition of Humanness

Observational Differences
The Proximate Inner Ground: Rationality
The Ultimate Ground: Metaphysicality
"Soul" as Center of Meaning
The Human Being as the Sick Animal
The Human Being as Religious Animal
The Human Being as Historical

4. Metaphysics and Practicality

The Meaning of Practicality
Immanence
Transcendence
Relativity of Norms
Levels of Transcendence
Subjectivity and the Sacred
Immanence and Transcendence
Metaphysics and Practicality

5. Abstract and Concrete

Identifying the Context of the Terms
Bodiliness and Concreteness
Concreteness and Universality
Object, Subject, Praxis

Section A. The Ancient-Medieval Tradition

6. Parmenides

"Heart" as Starting Point
The Logic of Being
Historical Aftermath
Heidegger's Approach

7. Plato

Metaphor and Allegory
Dreaming in the Cave
In the Light
Geometry as Paradigm
Eros and the Good
Epilogue on Plotinus

8. Aristotle

Empiricism and the Principles of Changing Being
The Hierarchy of Changing Being
Knowing and Being
Revisiting the One and the Good

9. Aquinas

Being and the Sensorily Given
Essence-Esse and God
Assimilation and Transformation of Aristotle
"The Mystical"
Analogy and the Transcendentals
Presence to Being

Section B. The Modern Tradition

10. Rene Descartes

Methodic Doubt and the Cogito
Being and God
Cogito, World, God
Response

11. Baruch Spinoza

Being as a Single Substance
Freedom
Unity
Response

12. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The Monad
Hierarchy
First Principles
Response

13. Immanuel Kant

The Ground of Kant's Thought
Sensibility
Categories
Reason
The Moral Order
Critique of Judgment
Response

14. G.W.F. Hegel

The Comprehension of Christian Revelation
The Phenomenology of Spirit
The Logic of the Logos
Nature and Spirit
Absolute Spirit
Response

15. Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead and Modern Physics
Whitehead and Plato
Response

16. Martin Heidegger

Situating Heidegger
Being, Truth, and Being-in-the-World
The Light of Being
Historicity and Authenticity
The Play of the Fourfold
The History of Truth and the Return to Meditative Thinking
Response

Epilogue: The Metaphysical Basis of Dialogical Pluralism

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index