William Desmond

William James Desmond (born January 7, 1951) is an Irish philosopher who has written on ontology, metaphysics, ethics, and religion.

Desmond earned his B.A. and M.A. from University College, Cork, in 1972 and 1974; Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1978.

Former president of the Hegel Society of America (1990–1992) and the Metaphysical Society of America (1995), Desmond is professor of philosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and also at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

He is a past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

In his trilogy, Being and The Between, Ethics and The Between, and God and The Between, Desmond works out an entirely new and complete metaphysical/ontological philosophical system based on what he calls the potencies of being and the senses of being.

His most original contribution in his metaphysics is the notion of the "metaxological", which will be explained below.

Desmond's program consists mainly in exploring the senses in which he claims that modernity has devalued being and what "to be" and "the good" might mean.

The ethos can be defined as the ontological matrix of value at any given time.

For Desmond, the human self always lives in what he calls the ethos.

The ethos is where we bring morality and concrete good through our power of affirming.

Simultaneously, we receive the hospitality of the ethos through what Desmond calls the "agapeic origin of the good".

The origin is the "original givenness that frees beings into their freedom" and must be understood as an agapeic gift which is overdetermined and thus cannot be aptly described or determined univocally or dialectically.

Within the ethos there are seven potencies of being.

This "enabling repertoire of self becoming" has the "character of an endowment", and is thus seen as a gift.

The potencies are not a program to follow; they simply are all together the powers from which ethical selvings, expressed through particular senses of being, take their endowment.

The seven potencies are:

Within the ontological matrix of being, the different potencies can be expressed differently through the senses of being.

These ways in which to express the potencies help explore the relations of sameness and difference within the ethos.

The four potencies are:

Different philosophers can be seen as embodying different potencies and senses of being throughout the history of philosophy.

Kant, for instance, is best defined as a transcendental univocalist.

Nietzsche would come close to something like an aesthete given his acknowledgment of the aesthetic/sensual part of being; he is, however, described by Desmond as being defined by the transcending potency and being both equivocal and a dialectician.

Hegel might be defined as a dialectician.

Desmond believes, however, that all of these philosophers are somehow haunted by those potencies which they seek to ignore or devalue.

There is a dialectics in Kant and there are equivocities in Nietzsche.

"Metaxological vigilance" shows a clearer picture of the ethos than do any views that restrict philosophical considerations to the other senses of being and potencies.