This chapter focuses on the aesthetic appeal of inanimate nature, plants, and animals. Hegel’s ontological privileging of living beings, and especially of animal bodies, comes hand in hand with their aesthetic privileging, and so particular focus is given to the beauty of animateness, and especially to that of animal bodies. It is argued that, while most appearances of animal life serve to disclose their finitude, and so their ontological dependency, there are striking moments in which their remarkable animateness stands out as such. And given that Hegel gives us good reason to think of life, in its ontology, as an essentially infinite and autonomous movement, this conspicuousness of animation provides us with an ephemeral glimpse of a more profound beauty. As the various dimensions of animation and its ways of appearing are explored in some detail, the chapter comes to argue, somewhat counter to Hegel though for Hegelian reasons, that it is particularly in animal movement – as opposed to the more static shape of the animal body, which is largely Hegel’s focus – that the full splendor of animateness is revealed.

Does it make sense to call God both infinite and absolutely simple. Goodman explores God’s biblical boundlessness, in dialogue with Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Maimonides, Spinoza, William Blake, Georg Cantor, and the Kabbalah?

This chapter applies the Pascalian picture developed in the rest of the book to the famous “wager.” With that background in place, we can see how the wager has been misunderstood, and that the correct interpretation is far more defensible than the standard one. The so-called wager is an argument designed to convince a very particular kind of person – one with only self-interest in their heart – to seek a change of heart. It is a predictable part of Pascal’s general aim in his philosophy, and it doesn’t make the silly mistakes that are often attributed to him. Pascal’s innovations, such as the notion of infinity, the ambiguity of the world, the dependence of reasons on the heart, and corrupting influence of bad desires, are brought to bear on the wager to present a plausible, and less radical picture of the role of belief in Pascal. Topics such as self-deception, alternative conceptions of God, and the benefits of seeking the love of God are addressed throughout.

This chapter traces the development of ideas concerning the divine nature over the course of the early scholastic period. In particular, it traces a shift which occurred over the course of the period, at the start of which scholastic theologians generally described God's nature as fundamentally simple, but over the course of which members of the Franciscan order in particular began to speak of God's nature as primarily infinite.

The final two Metaphysical Expositions argue that our original representation of space must be intuitive. I draw some surprising connections between Kant’s discussion and Leibniz’s account of the continuum. These connections indicate that the point of Kant’s analysis of <space> is to show that our original representation of space is infinitely complex in content. Since no discursive representation can be infinitely complex, our concept <space> cannot derive its content from discursive spontaneity. Its content must rather be given to the mind in order to be thought at all and thus originates in receptive intuition. Kant’s argument does not hinge on the singularity or holistic structure of space, as many hold, but on its infinite complexity and consequent givenness. I develop a novel account of the discursivity of conceptual representation that preserves the validity of Kant’s argument, defend Kant’s account of the infinity of space against prominent objections, and finally indicate how Kant’s argument entails the singularity of intuition (rather than presupposing it).

This essay introduces and explores David Tracy’s notion of ‘analogical imagination’ as something that prevents reason, theology, and social life from collapsing ‘into equivocation or else hopeless stupid conflict’. A capacious reflective reason, after Tracy, depends on imaginative habits and sensibilities that stay faithful to the discordant plurality and ambiguity of things while also acknowledging their analogies or ‘similarities-in-difference’. The essay argues that the continuing integrity and scope of Tracyean analogical imagination depends upon understanding that the negations that belong to apparently contrasting ‘dialectical imaginations’ reach ‘all the way down’ within analogical imagination itself. Aided by classic expressions of culture, furthermore, analogical imaginative possibility shades into contingent vision when organised by ‘focal meanings’ to fashion some global sense of the world. This is then brought into dialogue with Richard Kearney’s comparatively recent notion of ‘anatheism’, to help consideration of how Tracyean analogical imagination might maintain its imagination and ana- at the perilous point that it becomes also a matter of religious believing.

This introductory essay to the volume sets out the volume’s form and purpose, and then provides advance introduction of each of its component essays in turn. Since the volume comes together as a tightly organised and cumulative introduction to David Tracy, this essay forms its own concerted introduction to Tracy parallel to the performance of the book as a whole.

This essay begins with a close reading of Tracy’s recent programmatic formulations concerning: (1) the ‘strong fragments’ of culture that ‘shatter, fragment, negate any closed totality system’; and (2) those ‘most powerful fragments’ that ‘show themselves not as substances but as events and positively open to liminal Infinity’. If some cultural fragments are mere ‘period pieces’ without enduring truth or transformative power, and others are dangerously nostalgic, these fragments, Chase suggests, can act strongly when collaged into some ‘new form of witness against any false whole or claim to completeness’. T. S Eliot’s The Waste Land is an ambiguous example here. The pinnacle of the fragment for Tracy, however, is the ‘frag-event’ that opens towards the creative liminality of an invisible Infinity. ‘Marxist-Kabbalist’ Walter Benjamin is ‘the projective force’ behind Tracy’s forays into the fragment. The essay proposes the role of assemblage or collage for both fragmenting fragments and the Tracyean frag-event, stressing the role of edges and unexpected connections, and concluding by wondering how far Christian theology is really ready to think in such a manner of collage.

Thematically, formally and structurally, Wallace’s writing concerned itself with the infinite, from the antinomies of set theory and the obese Bombardini in The Broom of the System to the featureless horizon of Peoria in The Pale King, by way of the title of Infinite Jest and the brief and not wholly successful exploration of Cantorian mathematics in Everything and More, the idea of the infinite was never far from any of Wallace’s writing. Moreover, the structures of the writing continually reinscribe this obsession with infinity, with none of the novels conforming to a traditional boundaried structure and the collections of short fiction troubling the very concept of order in their use of pagination and enumeration. This chapter illuminates the importance of infinity to Wallace’s writing by exploring its formal and thematic development through his career, demonstrating that infinity worked as a conceptual counterpoint to solipsism, both an existential threat and a source of profound hope for the disassociated subject of contemporary culture.

Compares Cassirer and Heidegger's take on the human being's capacity to orient itself in the world in a meaningful way. Cassirer's theory of the functions of consciousness, the only meat to his functional conception of human subjectivity, is used to describe the diverse, cultural compasses by means of which the 'symbolic animal' navigates the human world (7.1). Heidegger's accounts of 'the they' and of owned ('authentic') existence in turn provide a theory of Dasein's capacity to orient itself within and towards its world (7.2). In view of their shared interest in orientation, I discern an important distinction for both Cassirer and Heidegger between an orienting and an oriented self. With regard to both, they ultimately disagree about the infinite (cultural) or finite (temporal) nature of the human being (7.3).