About the Book
"Being Reconfigured" presents some of the most audacious theses in recent phenomenological research. Challenging so much post-Heideggerian doxa, it argues against the contemporary denegation of Being, but also suggests that phenomenology itself can provide a viable and fruitful alternative to this impasse. Specifically, "Being Reconfigured" delineates the source of this 'refusal' of Being, in Husserl; the main strands it demonstrates, in Marion and Levinas; and the fundamental problems its entails - in Marion, the necessary retention of a 'metaphysical' subject, and in Levinas, the necessary revival of Kantian dualisms and diremptions. Beyond this critical survey, however, the book also provides an alternative perspective, through a reassessment of Edith Stein's 'generous ontology'. This delineates Stein's Patristic and Scholastic sources; amplifies her suggestions, through the work of Michel Henry, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas himself; and demonstrates the significance of Stein's phenomenology of Being-sustained and Being-safe(ty). By considering Being in these Steinian terms of support, safety, and charity, Leask's book concludes, we might overcome the difficulties outlined by its earlier chapters - and to do so by a radical reassessment of the Being that we take for granted.