Absolute Dialetheism: Hegel, Schelling and the End of Alterity(New Perspectives in Ontology)

By exposing and critiquing the hegemony of otherness and difference in 20th century philosophy, Gregory S. Moss liberates philosophy from the fetishization of incompleteness that dominates much of the history of the analytic and continental traditions. Inspired by German Idealism and the Kyoto School, Moss defends the view that the Absolute exists and can only be known as a true contradiction. Corresponding to its dialetheic theory of existence, he also offers a new theory of truth according to which only contradictions can be true. By thinking through the rational and mystical varieties of Absolute Dialetheism, the book argues for philosophical religion, a vision of the Absolute that unifies both philosophy and religion into a dialetheic conception of absolute knowledge.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Brook Ziporyn Preface: The Theocene Introduction: Philosophy as Absolute Thinking Purification and Absolute Dialectics Hegel’s Rational Dialetheism Schelling’s Metaphysical Empiricism Mystical Dialetheism Philosophical Religion The Ontological Genesis of the Absolute Absolute Nothingness and The Principle of Sufficient Reason Beyond Dialetheism: The Trans-Consistent Theory of Truth Conclusion: Alethic Singularity

About the Author :
Gregory S. Moss is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before joining CUHK, he was lecturer in Philosophy at Clemson University and was awarded his PhD in 2014 from University of Georgia, USA. He completed a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Bonn, Germany in 2013-14, where he investigated Schelling’s influence on Hegel’s Doctrine of the Concept under Markus Gabriel. He previously published Hegel’s Foundation Free Metaphysics: The Logic of Singularity (Routledge, 2020), winner of the 2022 Hegel PD prize. He has edited many volumes, including Mythical Totalities (Mohr Siebeck, 2024) and The Dialectics of Absolute Nothingness, co-edited with Takeshi Morisato (Cornell University Press, 2025). He has also translated two works from German into English, including Markus Gabriel's Why the World Does Not Exist (2015).

Review :
What I love about Moss’s book is that it shows how philosophy thought through absolutely on its own premises – from Descartes’s radical doubt to Hegel’s absolute knowing – is inherently contradictory and opens to a dimension that is religious or mystical along lines acknowledged by Wittgenstein and traced by Schelling. Thinking that is absolutely consistent with itself can become complacent for lack of confrontation with alterity, but Moss’s philosophy demonstrates how absolutely self-consistent thinking has to be absolutely self-contradictory. He upsets our most settled assumptions about the nature of thinking. His Absolute Dialetheism produces a provocatively new positioning among themselves of a great array of contemporary currents and classic monuments of philosophical thinking. What would it be to think the absolute—that than which nothing greater is thinkable? What would be required to think that absolute which is relative to the relativity that it opposes and is thus a violation of the principle of non-contradiction? In this provocative book, Gregory S. Moss calls on philosophy to reanimate Cartesian doubt, critique its assumption of logical principles, and harness a new logic of paradox. This, Moss argues, allows us to think the absolute as a true contradiction and thereby embrace absolute dialetheism. While critiquing adherence to traditional logic in various quarters, Absolute Dialetheism draws on German idealism and the Kyoto School in order to wrench thinking from the safety of finitude and to guide it toward that infinite which alone can satisfy the philosophical vocation. This book is a model of following philosophical inquiry where it leads---in this case, all the way to the Absolute, which is both unavoidably contradictory, and inexorably true to itself. Gregory Moss details a compelling scholarly picture of how the rational meets the mystical, in closely argued and often arresting writing. Dialetheism is pushed to the limit in this unflinching exploration of what happens when truth goes beyond the consistent. Gregory Moss's challenging and much-anticipated book is nothing short of the most rigorous and impassioned embrace of the Absolute that one could hope for, welcome, or, perhaps, fear. Moss offers just the right cure for the maladies of an all-too-familiar philosophy--in the analytic and continental traditions alike--that has become too conservative and too willing to make embarrassing appeals to intuition. By showing us how to cease worshipping at the altar of the principle of non-contradiction and at the altar of finitude, Moss teaches us to "begin to think anew about the Absolute in the twenty-first century," an Absolute that is at once mystical but also rational in the most thoroughgoing way possible. ‘In this book, Gregory Moss brings us back to the philosophical vocation of thinking the Absolute and he presents the provocative thesis of the Absolute Dialetheism: the Absolute is contradictory and the contradiction of the Absolute is the end of alterity. What Moss defines as the end of alterity is not the vanishing of what is other, but its full realisation. What is disclosed is the other in its absolute otherness, and this is possible only for a philosophy that returns to the challenge, necessary and vital for any philosophy that aspires to keep faith to itself, of thinking the Absolute. We can face this challenge only by accepting the impossible and the unthinkable: absolute otherness as the otherness of the Absolute, the absolute othering itself, its constitutive self-negation, its self-contradiction as the essence and truth of the Absolute itself. - Michela Bordignon, Universidade Federal do ABC