Foreword
By William Desmond
Preface
Introduction
1
The Absence of the Essential
1.1 An Essenceless World
The Reversal of Positions
The Dominion of Wealth
Comedy and Cynicism
1.2 The Protest of Faith
Faith as Flight
The Essencelessness of Faith
1.3 The "Retrieval" of the Essential. The Struggle of the Enlightenment
God's Disappearance
The Unsatisfied Enlightenment
1.4 A One-Dimensional World and a Distant God
2
Ways of Thinking toward God
2.1 Faith and Thought
Faith
The Experience of Thought
2.2 Enigmatic Contingency
Why Something at All . . . ?
An Informational Intermezzo: Concerning Proofs of God
An Example: Thomas Aquinas
A Necessary Ground for All That Is
The Decisive Presupposition
2.3 The Actuality of Thought
Intermezzo
Anselm. Thought and Being
Descartes. Subjectivity and Infinitude
God as Ground and Measure
2.4 The Experience of Limits and Openness
3
An Abyss for Thought
3.1 The Limits of Thought
The Decisive Point: Thought and Being
Contingency
The Well-Ordered Cosmos
3.2 The Scope of the Critique
It Concerns the Entirety of Philosophy
The Ideal of Pure Reason
The Positive Turn
3.3 Kant's Way: The Absoluteness of the Ought
The Indisputable Moral "Fact"
The Postulate of God's Existence
3.4 The Limits of the Limits
Critique of the Critique
The Metaphysical Élan
4
Auschwitz: The End of an Illusion?
4.1 The Mystery of Evil
Beyond Any Concept?
The Sting of Moral Evil
4.2 The Mystery of Freedom
The Refusal of Adorno
Kant: Evil and Freedom
4.3 The Rose and the Cross
God and Evil
Evil Is Not Absolute
5
Human Finitude and the Presence of God
5.1 Finitude as Boundary
Heidegger: The Desacralisation of the World
The Metaphysics of Subjectivity
Thinking Does Not Merely "Happen" to Us
5.2 The Mystery of God's Presence
The Death of God
Nietzsche as Child of His Time
Hegel: The Absolute Is Present
Finite Transcendence?
Philosophy's Claim to Truth
Notes
Cited Literature
About the Author
Index