University of Dallas News

Issue date: 2/2/10 Section: News

Media Credit: Peter McDonough Dr. William Desmond of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven lectures on Aquinas.

This past Thursday evening, before the festivities of Groundhog, students gathered in Lynch Auditorium for an equally noteworthy annual event, the 2010 Aquinas Lecture. The Aquinas Lecture, hosted by the University of Dallas philosophy department, is an important event in the life of the University. Held every year on or around the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Aquinas Lecture brings a distinguished speaker to the University to speak on a philosophical topic usually related to the work of the Angelic Doctor.

This year's honored speaker was the prominent Irish philosopher Dr. William Desmond. Teaching now at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, Desmond is a former president of both the Hegel Society of America and the Metaphysical Society of America and is the current president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Author of 17 published books and nearly 100 articles, Desmond has contributed substantially to modern philosophical thought, his greatest contribution being perhaps the notion of the metaxological. Derived from the Greek word metaxu, meaning "between," the notion of the metaxological provided the key to Desmond's lecture Thursday evening.

In his lecture, Desmond presented his theory of the four senses of being, these being the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical and the metaxological. He explained that each of these four senses has a different degree of determinacy: The univocal, being related to intelligibility and identity, can be understood as the determinate; the equivocal, concerned with difference, can be understood as the indeterminate; the dialectical, characterized by self-mediated wholeness, can be understood as the self-determinate; the metaxological, characterized by the interplay of sameness and difference, can be understood as the over-determinate.

The majority of Desmond's lecture was concerned with the dialectical and the metaxological as they relate to Hegel and Aquinas. Desmond raised the concern that in Hegel and in much of recent thought, the dialectical sense of being and the determination of self against the other has led metaphysics to become closed off and concerned only with the immanent.

However, in the metaxological sense of being, there is the understanding of the over-determinate that prevents constriction or definition and leaves the mediation between sameness and difference open to the transcendent.

Desmond proceeded to relate the metaxological sense of being to Aquinas' understanding of analogy and divine transcendence. He referred to Aquinas' three ways of argument - the "via causalitatis," the "via negativa" and the "via eminentia" - relating them to the univocal, the equivocal and the metaxological senses of being, culminating in the conclusion that, through consideration of the metaxological, metaphysics can remain porous to the permeation of divine transcendence.

Desmond's lecture was followed by a short response from UD's Dr. Robert Wood. Wood commented on the lecture and requested further clarification on some aspects of Desmond's thought.

Following Desmond's response, there was little time for questions; however, the overall response of the audience seemed, despite the dense and complex nature of the lecture, to be one of curious consideration of the proposed metaxological sense of being.

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