Metaphysics and Transcendence

Description

In the light of advances in cosmology, mathematics and logic in the twenty-first century, metaphysics is in need of a fundamental overhaul. From standpoints in the humanities, modernism made exaggerated or unwarranted claims for reducing or removing transcendence. Such claims cannot now be justified in the light of discoveries at the frontiers of the sciences, although previous ways of depicting transcendence were frequently crude and unsustainable. Metaphysics and Transcendence takes up this story for the future. Arthur Gibson presents a new metaphysics with a genealogy based on counter-intuition and locates counter-intuition and complexity at the foundations of truth. Having devised fresh concepts on the basis of the new frontiers of science and philosophy, the author presents original explanations of transcendence arguing that just as we need revolutionary and original ways of depicting the physical world, so it is with such topics as God, miracles, the resurrection, the source and identity of consciousness and reason itself. Metaphysics and Transcendence is set to stimulate future philosophical and religious discussion in its challenge to philosophy and theology to "get real", to come out of institutionalised pigeonholes and to recognise that metaphysics and transcendence are highly creative subjects.

Arthur Gibson is Reader in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Surrey, Roehampton. He is the author of God and the Universe (Routledge, 2000).