"Beyond Sovereignty is a splendid new step in the scintillating trajectory of thought that has been traced out by D.G. Leahy over the past several decades. With a systematic rigor not seen in American philosophy since Peirce, Leahy sets out his vision of the fourfold structure of ethics—a vision at once convincing and original. In so doing, he shows the relevance of his thinking to contemporary figures such as Levinas, Agamben, and Badiou.  Altogether an astonishing achievement."

                                               Edward S. Casey

"D.G. Leahy’s philosophical work goes beyond the merely radical, opting for an absolutely new departure, an 'essentially new form of thinking' as we enter the third millennium. Its signature feature is that thinking is weaned of every last vestigial attachment to modern subjectivity, eliminating wholesale the grip of the Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian legacy. This utter elimination of subjectivity is an innovation of such immense consequence that an entirely new approach to ethics becomes imperative: there is need for an ethics absolutely without self, entirely beyond the notion of self-consciousness, entirely beyond the logic of Same and Other. Beyond Sovereignty articulates this absolutely new beginning for ethics. Now that existing is understood to be an essentially creative mode of being, ethics is concerned with love that actually creates the other."

"Beyond Sovereignty is a radically new and truly profound revolutionary ethics, one reversing every manifest ethics so as to create ethics as an embodied omnipotence, as that Good creating the world here and now. While this book deeply engages contemporary philosophy, it is far more fundamentally an absolutely new philosophical theology, and one realizing that Godhead which is an absolute and total creativity."

                                                 Thomas J.J. Altizer

"Faith and Philosophy: The Historical Impact clarifies and extends the remarkable achievements of Leahy's earlier works, Novitas Mundi and Foundation.  His profound grasp both of the history of metaphysics and of Christian thought, feeling and practice places him in a unique position to read the deepest currents of Western culture, from its origins to the present time.  To my mind, Leahy is the pre-eminent thinker working today at the boundaries of faith and philosophy.  Faith and Philosophy is simply astonishing in its brilliance and breadth, a true feast for both the mind and soul.

"While all of his thought is original, in the sense of uncovering origins, a particularly novel aspect of his work is the way in which he weaves the American contribution to thought and religious life into the larger Western dialogue on being, faith and essence.  This has been long overdue.  In the global context, American thought has either been praised in isolation or dismissed in isolation, rarely intimately connected to the larger narrative of faith and reason."

                                            Nathan L. Tierney, California Lutheran University

"The author of Faith and Philosophy has a story to tell, and that story is a particular history of Western philosophy from Aristotle to the pragmatism of Peirce, and then onwards to what he calls the 'new thinking' which is emerging in this new millennium, a 'new thinking' focused on the notion of 'beginning' rather than on either being or non-being.  The book thus gives historical depth to Leahy's philosophical explorations in Foundation: Matter the Body Itself and in Novitas Mundi. 

"The story's main characters are Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Levinas, Jefferson, Emerson and Peirce (with John Paul II providing occasional commentary). . . .  The links between the different episodes and those between the characters’ parts are particularly well made."

"For those willing to persevere with long quotations and dense reasoning, this book will be thought-provoking.  Readers will be left with a deeper sense of the 'abyss' which Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have laid bare, and of the difficulty of climbing out of it; they will be left pondering the possibility that the notion of 'beginning' might form a new episode in the story." 

"A philosophy of 'beginning' could be politically revolutionary, whereas American pragmatism is essentially conservative.  An exploration of the political consequences of a ‘beginning’ philosophy would be interesting to see." 

                                                   Malcolm Torry in Theology January/February 2004

"My wife and I were once driven to Murree in Pakistan, from where you can see many of the higher peaks in the Himalayas.  This is so different from the experience of standing on one of those peaks, yet we were 'close'.  I feel somewhat similar about the 'new thinking' that Leahy both embodies and celebrates.  I can see that the idea of a Real Beginning in Time, which Leahy relates to the apocalyptic horizon of biblical thinking, can function as a genuinely new category for ontological thought, mediating between Being and Becoming.  Leahy also attempts to overcome Kierkegaard’s objection to Hegel’s logic (i.e., that it cannot include real life) through using categories developed by the American pragmatists.  He presents a trinary logic as the foundation of 'the new way of thinking' which does seem to overcome limitations in Hegel’s logic and even the logic developed by Peirce.  The common aim of these different logical systems seems to be the articulation of ontologically fundamental relationships between Mind (or Spirit), Logic (or Science) and Nature.  Whether these systems can successfully articulate our human experience of these deep matters is, as Leahy says, a question about our faith in reason and reason as an expression of faith.  Whether, in addition, this effort is seriously presenting us with an adequate, indeed, inescapable account of the nature of God, seems to me to be quite a different question.  Leahy’s book makes more sense to me as a new and better answer to the former question than to the latter.  My main reservation about the book is that the author—in my view—seems to confuse these two questions in a regrettably systematic fashion. 

"Despite the denseness of the presentation and the seemingly grandiose conclusion, the thesis of this book is sufficiently well-established and challenging to repay careful study.  It aims to provide a benchmark for the ontological thinking of the future.  Its success in this aim will depend upon its fruitfulness for the further thinking of readers, particularly those readers who come to a more clear recognition of their ownmost thinking in its abstract formulations than I was able to achieve.  I commend Faith and Philosophy to anyone interested in the nature and logic of western ontological reason and of fundamental ontology in relation to theology."

                                               Sandy Yule in Pacifica, Volume 17, Number 2, June 2004

"In Foundation: Matter the Body Itself Leahy is truly giving us our deepest philosophical and theological challenge, one which very few have thus far been able to meet in any way, and if this is the challenge of pure thinking, it is also the challenge of pure writing, and even if this is the most difficult writing in our history, it is a writing which truly creates its reader, and creates its reader as a truly new reader and thinker.  All our postmodernities crumble into insignificance in confrontation with this challenge, but so do our existing philosophies and theologies, as when in Leahy's work we are truly and absolutely confronted with an Either/Or."

                                            Thomas J. J. Altizer, International Studies in Philosophy XXXV.4

"Foundation: Matter the Body Itself is Leahy's monumental effort to turn Western metaphysics inside out and establish it on a new foundation, working from, in his terms, an 'absolute new beginning.'  This will no doubt strike readers at first glance as an effort to resuscitate the dead corpse of foundationalism, that failed project of Descartes--and behind him of Plotinus and Plato--to ground being and our knowledge of being on a foundation independent of the fluctuations of exposed and changeable matter.  But this does not capture the purpose of Leahy's project at all. Quite the contrary, his search for an absolute beginning is not remotely Cartesian or Plotinian.

"In both of those projects we have an attempt to search for an absolute beginning before or away from matter or the body.  But for Leahy, as the subtitle of his book clearly indicates, this beginning is to be found by admitting the body's anchor in being and being's anchor in the body, so that one pursues metaphysics from the basis of the body, that locus of human being that makes being as such so exposed.

"Like Husserl before him, Leahy wants his beginning to be absolute. But unlike Husserl, he wants to think through the being of the world so that one comes to see that the world itself is thinking through the thinker.  This is why Leahy calls the world essentially historical: because the thinker is the world thinking through itself, the world is the enactment of human history, or as he phrases it: 'For the first time the world itself is essentially historical.'  He sees facing us a literal novitas mundi, a world so new as to demand new categories not just for its understanding but for its enactment."

                 Edward T. Oakes, S.J., Review Article in Journal of Religion

"The single most significant work of philosophical theology to be written in many decades. Leahy takes on the form of future thinking, a thinking without self, managing this remarkable feat by critiquing, with great precision and logical sophistication, the binary logics of Boole and Peirce. He proposes a ternary logic in which no term is, in any way, a nothing. 

"In Foundation Leahy continues the critique of being and time begun in Novitas Mundi, with a magnificent constructive and demonstrative metaphysics that is likely to be closely studied and controversially explored for decades to come. This work reinvigorates the theological idea and necessity of the Trinity. It also provokes important parallel ideas from classic Buddhist thought.

"Leahy takes the absolute seriously in a way that no philosopher has done since Hegel."

                                                                The Reader's Review

"If God, Godhead, Trinity, Incarnation, Time and Eternity are significant to and central in Christian theology, this work is central to theology. If the relation between the ideal and the actual, the local and the universal are significant to and central in philosophy, this work is central to philosophy. In Foundation the author combines rigorous systematic thinking with a remarkable knowledge of the history of ideas: his concepts resituate many of the classical thinkers in both theology and philosophy. Especially stunning, to this reviewer, is Leahy's reconstrual of Aquinas (and medieval thought generally), Hegel, and the uniquely American philosophers.

"Leahy opens another 'high road around modernity,' and thus an appealing alternative to a variety of post-modernisms while retaining their critical force. He restores thinking to centrality in theology, rescuing it from a mindless drift in recent decades. Eschewing any final distinction between theology and philosophy, he sees in the American theology embodied in this thinking the fulfillment of American philosophy's aspiration to (hitherto postponed) perfectly 'exterior' Godhead."

                                                                       Ray L. Hart, Boston University

"Novitas Mundi is a most remarkable undertaking which, while immensely erudite, transcends its own scholarship to convey the sense of a world of thought to come. I have been particularly impressed by the success with which this book takes fully into account Heidegger's notion of the history of Being -- surely one of the most provocative contentions of twentieth century philosophy -- and yet in the end provides an alternative reading of this history, one that is in certain ways more convincing and nuanced than Heidegger's own version. This is an accomplishment of the highest level."

                                                                    Edward S. Casey, SUNY Stony Brook

"Novitas Mundi may be illuminated most by a comparison with Karl Barth. First, what is envisaged is a thinking that begins absolutely or with itself, or, to put it differently, with revelation. As such, it leaves behind, as no longer pertinent, doubts and questions about existence; it simply proceeds. Second, this 'catholicological' theology can be other than either thetic or antithetic because it already has, within itself, the most radical opposition to itself in the thought that its own thought is the 'sinner' who is 'saved,' the contra-thinker of the thinking. Just as Barth was able to break through the divisiveness of the decretum horribile which had determined the Calvinist doctrine of divine election, so Leahy, here, breaks through a tradition in which the ecumenical must be the uniform and the spiritual cannot be the material; both break through the tradition in which the created cannot be the redeemed."

                                                   Robert P. Scharlemann, University of Virginia, Charlottesville

"In my judgment, Novitas Mundi is quite simply the most important work of philosophical theology published in our century."

                                                                 Thomas J.J. Altizer, SUNY Stony Brook

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