ABSTRACT
The risk of post-metaphysics is that of parochialism, in which experience constitutes an order of practice intelligible only within a particular community. A Christological arrangement of the two terms follows: metaphysics embraces, without eliding, the ineluctably conventional nature of Christ’s first-century Palestinian ministry and the prophetic call of grace that appeals to every form or convention of experience. This chapter outlines a definition of metaphysics in the broadest sense, a constructive interchange between metaphysics and theology will come into fuller view. Onto-theology has cast a pall over metaphysics, and it constitutes for philosophy and theology embattled intellectual terrain. Post-metaphysics retreats altogether from the question of Being, in order to escape from totality’s economy of abstraction, and the conceptual violence such an act entails. The chapter argues that metaphysics, in its historically narrow definition, is onto-theology, and that the particular understanding of Western philosophy is restrictive.
