The re-examination of Saint Paul's letters in contemporary European philosophy is one of the most important developments at the crossroads of philosophy and theology today. In discussion with a range of authors contributing to this movement, including Heidegger, Badiou, Agamben, and Taubes, Gert-Jan van der Heiden offers a new and systematic account of the philosophical potential of these letters. He does so by uncovering a dialectic of exception, which revolves around the Pauline notions of the outcast and the spirit. Against a general tendency to understand the significance of Paul in politico-theological terms alone, van der Heiden focuses on the ontological potential of Saint Paul's letters by elucidating what they imply for our thinking about (non-)beings, world, event, time, exception and spirit. Ultimately, he shows how this dialectic implies a new understanding of being and thinking and gives rise to a new art of living, both ethically and politically. Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Professor of Metaphysics at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Professor of Metaphysics at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the author of The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony (SUNY, 2020), Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy (Duquesne University Press, 2014), The Truth (and Untruth) of Language: Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement (Duquesne University Press, 2010). He is co-editor of The Gadamerian Mind (Routledge, 2022) and Saint Paul and Philosophy: The Consonance of Ancient and Modern Thought (De Gruyter, 2017). He is editor-in-chief of the Brill series Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology.