Philip Gonzales

Project leader:

Dr Philip Gonzales (St Patrick’s College, Maynooth)

Title:

Analogical Metaphysics and Incarnate Mimetic Desire

Description:

This is a forward-looking project that opens a future horizon of philosophical theology within the continental tradition by negotiating a constructive dialogue between metaphysics and anthropology. It does so by productively enquiring into the meaning and being of our humanity, focusing on the concepts of freedom and imitation in relation to the phenomena and/or realities of desire, violence, and religious conversion, within the reimagined resources of an analogical metaphysics.

Within this project, the conceptual apparatus of the analogia entis—defined as a metaphysics of creation, gift, and love—operates within the flesh and blood horizon of mimetic human relations, read in reference to the phenomena of desire, violence, and religious conversion. The analogia entis is widened into a metaphysics that is a theoretical description of the dynamics of human desire in relation to the transcendent source of freedom. Metaphysics is elaborated as a spiritual and communal practice of continual conversion to non-violence that lives within a peaceful and thankful reception of being-as-gift, received from the Triune God of love and creation. The hermeneutic key of imitation is shown as the catalyst of the metaphysical working of the analogia entis because metaphysics is presented as new way of seeing and participating in the world that is opened via models of imitation that testify to the truth of love of the transcendent source of being and freedom.

In sum, metaphysics is construed as a happening within a mimetic process of continual conversion to non-violence opened via models of imitation. Metaphysical models incarnate the truth of love held in a metaphysics of creation and/or gift. This project presents a vision of the future of philosophical theology that is a mimetic analogical metaphysics of incarnate desire, a metaphysics of the practice of conversion and testimony.