The Structural-Systematic Research Program in
Philosophy
Being and God. A Systematic Approach in
Confrontation with Heidegger, Lévinas,
and Marion. Lorenz B. Puntel, translated by
and in collaboration with Alan White (forthcoming 2011, Northwestern UP)
Of subject matters for philosophy, God is among the
most obscure, complex, and ambiguous. Being and God makes no
attempt at an exhaustive treatment of it; it shows instead—especially
in extensive opposition to Heidegger, whose works repeatedly present a
deeply misleading but widely influential caricature of the metaphysical
tradition—that the problem can be treated
rationally and argumentatively— in a word, with
theoretical rigor—within a comprehensive
philosophical framework that makes possible and requires a systematic
conception of being as such and as a whole; subsequently, it sketches such
a conception. In an extensive closing chapter, the book demonstrates
the untenability of the approaches to the problem taken by Émmanuel Lévinas
and Jean-Luc Marion, the two most radical postmodernist opponents of all
attempts to develop a theoretically rigorous account of the positive
relation between Being and God.
