THE GOD OF METAPHYSICS pdf download

The God of Metaphysics

THE GOD OF METAPHYSICS

In this book a number of metaphysical systems are examined in such detail as is practicable.

There are probably only a few of my hoped-for readers who are at home with each and all of them, and so most readers should learn something about a significant philosophical system not very familiar to them. However, the book is intended also as a contribution to the continuing debate about these thinkers among the cognoscenti.

 What links these systems together is that each provides a case for a religious view of the world based on rational or would-be rational argument.

 That a seriously religious perspective on things can derive, or win important support, from metaphysics is denied by many thinkers—for example, by Blaise Pascal (criticizing especially Rene Descartes), by Soren Kierkegaard (criticizing especially Hegel and Hegelians), and by William James, John Macmurray, and others.

According to such thinkers, a God whose existence is supposed to be demonstrated in a philosophical treatise is not the God of ‘Abraham, Isaac and the Christians’ or (so those not thinking exclusively from the point of view of Judaeo-Christianity may add) of any actual or possible living religious faith at all.

In the light of this, the present book examines some of the metaphysical systems which their authors did think of as offering some kind of demonstration of (or at least a philosophical locus for) religious truth, whether Christian or other¬ wise.