Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Spell of John Duns Scotus

John Llewelyn (retired) was Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis and Loyola University Chicago. He was one of the first Anglophone philosophers to engage constructively with Derrida’s thought. His publications include The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity: Toward a Wider Suffrage (Indiana University Press, 2012), Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida (Indiana University Press, 2009), Seeing Through God: A Geophenomenology (Indiana University Press, 2004), Appositions – of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (Indiana University Press, 2002), The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas (Routledge, 2000), Emmanuel Levinas: The Geneaology of Ethics (Routledge, 1995), The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhoos of Levinas, Heidegger and Others (Macmillan, 1991), Derrida on the Threshold of Sense (Macmillan, 1986) and Beyond Metaphysics? The Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Macmillan, 1985). His translation of Friedrich Hogemann’s Dimensions of the Logical is forthcoming this year with Peter Lang.

• Part I: 1. The Crux2. Instress Scaped and Inscape Stressed3. Parsing the Poem of Parmenides4. Hopkins’s Double Discovery, of Scotus and of Himself5. Some Transcendentals 6. Another Transcendental?Part II: 7. Seeming, Observing and Observance8. Peirce’s Post-Kantian Categories9. Ecceity, Ipseity and Existents10. Being as Doing11. From Method of Ignorance to Way of Love12. Categories and Transcendentals TranscendedAfterwordNotesSelective BibliographyIndex

This is an exquisite work of scholarship by an extraordinary thinker at the height of his powers. The significance of Duns Scotus for Hopkins’ philosophical and poetic originality is well-known. What has never been exhibited before is the scope and complexity of that lineage. Llewelyn writes with an authority and intimate grasp of the material that is truly breathtaking.