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date: 19 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter suggests that metaphysics in modernity has focused on the determinability of being, and with bringing being from a perplexing and equivocal indeterminacy towards more and more univocal determination. We look to overtake conceptually the original overdeterminacy, and to that degree the project is also the overcoming of metaphysical astonishment. To this end we reconfigure the given ethos of being in a variety of univocal figurations. The end of metaphysics seems to lie in the absolute determinability of being, and with this the dissolution of the original astonishment. The doing of metaphysics is its undoing. The chapter examines how an unrelenting stress on determinability yields the inverse result, namely, an indeterminacy verging on the voiding of being. The reflections here lead to Kant and Hegel as hugely significant for metaphysics in modernity, and for what comes after modernity.

Keywords: metaphysics, being, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, modernity

William Desmond

William Desmond is Professor of Philosophy at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and David Cook Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Villanova University. He is the author of Being and the Between (winner of the Prix Cardinal Mercier and the J. N. Findlay Award for best book in metaphysics, 1995–7), Ethics and the Between, and God and the Between. He is Past President of the Hegel Society of America, the Metaphysical Society of America, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association. His most recent books are The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (2012) and the William Desmond Reader (2012).

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