God as Otherwise Than Being: Toward a Semantics of the Gift (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) - Softcover

Calvin Schrag is George Ade Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Purdue University. He published his first book, Existence and Freedom, with Northwestern University Press in 1961 and is the subject of NUP's recently published Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity.

The most important American Continental philosopher of his generation and one of the discipline's founders offers an exceptionally clear, balanced, and informative discussion of a complex question vexing postmodern currents of philosophical and theological reflection: whether and how the "death" of the God conceived as a "highest being" in Western, and especially modern, traditions might open a new space within which to rethink God in terms of a "gift" or a "giving" that would stand beyond the category of being and exceed conceptual grasp.
Schrag begins by elucidating traditional theistic conceptions of God in terms of "Being" and explains how those conceptions very logically give way to atheism. Moving beyond atheism and theism alike, he explores alternative understandings of God in terms of "the gift" by turning first from ontology into ethics, and then from ethics toward an understanding of the gift as "the depth-dimension of ethics in civil society." Throughout, Schrag draws with grace, ease, and precision upon the history of Western metaphysics, from Plato and Aristotle through Nietzsche and Heidegger. Most important to his central question of God as "otherwise than Being," however, are such influential post-Heideggerian thinkers as Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. Schrag's inquiry engages these thinkers at a serious level, and also expands recent discussions of the God "beyond" or "otherwise than" Being by relating them to figures hitherto overlooked or underplayed, most notably Paul Tillich.
Seeking a notion of God compatible with the postmodern perspective, Schrag's remarkably lucid and accessible work stands as a helpful guide, providing rare insight, into an often impenetrable philosophical and theological quandry.