Beyond Mere Causality

In this collection of essays, A. J. Illingworth outlines some of the key ideas of his consolidated Christian philosophy. Engaging with both the canonical figures of Western philosophy and patristic sources, Illingworth paints a picture of metaphysics and epistemology as fundamentally theological in character, and reads these conclusions into such figures as Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. What we are left with is a view of human nature afflicted by a constant need for the transcendent which modern philosophy has denied us, but which is nevertheless forcefully presented to us in the facts of our moral sense, our freedom, and experience which points to a mode of existence beyond the mechanical and causal operations of the material world. The second half of the book is a collection of aphoristic commentaries and brief essays on a variety of philosophical and theological ideas from across the centuries.