God and Subjectivity is an essentially metaphysical monograph, but one that is cast in an historical mode: it reports on first philosophy as a biography of the concept of being. Its thesis is that St. Anselm's notion of God provided a pivot on which philosophy turned from the Aristotelian conception of substance as the object of ???first philosophy??? to Descartes' conception of the subject as the ground of ???science???. The changeover is not new, of course, but Anselm as the catalyst is; and an effort is made to ...
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God and Subjectivity is an essentially metaphysical monograph, but one that is cast in an historical mode: it reports on first philosophy as a biography of the concept of being. Its thesis is that St. Anselm's notion of God provided a pivot on which philosophy turned from the Aristotelian conception of substance as the object of ???first philosophy??? to Descartes' conception of the subject as the ground of ???science???. The changeover is not new, of course, but Anselm as the catalyst is; and an effort is made to present his role in the development with as much textual support and sustained argument as possible. Even Feuerbach appears, in this light, as a kind of inversion of the Anselmian argument.
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