Philosophy and Theology

ONLINE FIRST

published on August 6, 2021

Terence Sweeney

Ways to God
William Desmond’s Recapitulation of Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways

In this article, I explore how William Desmond recovers Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways by offering a new way for considering the relation of God to being. I do so in the context of Charles Taylor’s reflections on the immanent frame and the possibility of thinking towards God in the secular age. Desmond renews Aquinas proofs by seeing in them a hermeneutic openness to God. Considering each of Aquinas’s five ways through the lens of Desmond’s philosophy, I argue that each proof reveals God’s ways of being within being as a path to recovering an awareness of God’s presence in the world.