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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.
About the author
William Desmond is Professor in the Philosophy Department at Loyola College. He is the author of
Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics; Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind, and editor of
Hegel and His Critics, all published by SUNY Press; and the author of
Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness.
