This book explores the contested place of metaphysics since Kant and Hegel, arguing for a renewed metaphysical thinking about the intimate strangeness of being.

Part memoir, part meditation, this book is an exploration of death from an “insider’s” point of view. Using the threads of her brother’s early death and her twenty years of work in hospice care, Eve Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and illuminate her travels through the land of the dying. This is neither an academic text nor a self-help manual; rather, it is a foray into the land of death and dying as seen through the lens of art and the imagination. Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a build-up of thematic resonances. Joseph writes toward thinking about death and in the process finds the brother she lost as a young girl. She wrote the book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrific. Replete with literary allusions and references, from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag to D. H. Lawrence and Voltaire, this is an absolutely absorbing and inspired consideration of how we die and how we deal with it; a profoundly moving and helpful meditation on the mystery that awaits us all.

The ever increasing ability of medical technology to reshape the human body in fundamental ways - from organ and tissue transplants to reconstructive surgery and prosthetics - is something now largely taken for granted. But for a philosopher, such interventions raise fundamental and fascinating questions about our sense of individual identity and its relationship to the physical body. Drawing on and engaging with philosophers from across the centuries, Jenny Slatman here develops a novel argument: that our own body always entails a strange dimension, a strangeness that enables us to incorporate radical physical changes.

Known especially for his original system of metaphysics in a trilogy of books published between 1995 and 2008, and for his scholarship on Hegel, William Desmond has left his mark on the philosophy of religion, ethics, and aesthetics. The William Desmond Reader provides for the first time in a single book a point of entry into his original and constructive philosophy, including carefully chosen selections of his works that introduce the key ideas, perspectives, and contributions of his philosophy as a whole. Also featured is an original essay by Desmond himself reflecting synthetically on the topics covered, as well as an interview by Richard Kearney.

In contemporary philosophy the status, indeed the very viability of metaphysics is a much contested issue. The reflections offered here explore diverse aspects of this contested status and offer a defense of metaphysics. In other works, perhaps most fully in Being and the Between, William Desmond has tried to develop what he calls a metaxological metaphysics in response to different skeptical, if not hostile approaches to metaphysics quite common in our time. The Voiding of Being complements the systematic dimensions of this metaxological metaphysics outlined in Being and the Between. It presents a set of studies which amplify important themes in the unfolding of modern metaphysics, in relation to major earlier and contemporary thinkers, while adding nuance to what is involved in the more systematic articulation of a metaxological metaphysics. There is what the author calls a voiding of being in modernity, expressed in diverse developments of thought. “The Voiding of Being,” might seems to conjure up too negative associations but the aim of the thoughts gathered here is not at all negative. While attempting to understand the voiding of being in modern thought, our appreciation of the promise of metaphysical thinking can also be renewed and indeed extended – extended beyond skepticism and hostility to metaphysics. Desmond engages many interlocutors along the way, from the long tradition, such as Heraclitus, Aquinas and Hegel, as well as more contemporary thinkers like Heidegger and Marion. As the book’s subtitle suggests, it is concerned with the continued doing of metaphysics and not only the contemporary undoing of it.

William Desmond dwells on elemental experiences that keep the soul alive to the enigma of the divine. He pursues what is intimate yet universal: sleep, reverence, hatred and love, peace and war.

"A study of reliquaries as a form of representation in medieval art. Explores how reliquaries stage the importance and meaning of relics using a wide range of artistic means from material and ornament to metaphor and symbolism"--Provided by publisher.