Sein und Gott

Of subject matters for philosophy, God is among the most obscure, complex, and ambiguous. Lorenz B. Puntel makes no attempt at an exhaustive treatment of it; he 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, he sketches such a conception. In an extensive closing chapter, Puntel 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.