ABSTRACTA number of contemporary authors have argued that Aquinas’s understanding of God is ontotheological. In this paper, I consider the charge as it is formulated by Kevin Hart in his influential book The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy. Hart claims that three features of Aquinas’s approach to the divine make it ontotheological, namely that it privileges positive theology over negative theology, regards God as the ‘highest value’, and takes God to be the essence of beings. I argue (...) that these features are either not to be found in Aquinas’s thinking about God or that Hart misunderstands them. (shrink)

Scotus’ theory of univocity is described: his exact definition of univocity and his view of transcendental concepts that are ‘simply simple’. These concepts are said to be univocally applied to God and creatures. Next, we describe Scotus’ views on univocity in ‘being’ and the precise meaning of the infinite and finite ‘mode’ of being. Finally, we apply these results to work of Heidegger and Marion. It appears that they had an insufficient grasp of the intricacies of Scotus’ theory of univocity (...) and that Marion’s religious phenomenology could have benefitted from these scotistic tools. (shrink)

Can philosophical inquiry into divinity be authentic to its subject, God, without adapting its categories to the challenges of its scriptural inspiration, be that biblical or Quranic? This essay argues that it cannot, and that the adaptation, while it can be articulated in semantic terms, must rather amount to a transformation of standard philosophical strategies. Indeed, without such a radical transformation, “philosophy of religion” will inevitably mislead us into speaking of a “god” rather than our intended object.