Chapter 10 shows that Kierkegaard develops his views on faith and reason by using classical German philosophy from Leibniz to Kant. Specifically, he develops the much-discussed category of the leap by making creative use of Jacobi and Lessing. The result is an original account of the leap relevant to both philosophy of religion and more general debates concerning rationality, incommensurability, and noncommensurability. Specifically, the “leap” concerns both general transitions between different normative standards and religious conversions in particular. Even when different standards diverge and conflict, such leaps need not be blind or irrational, if one abandons standards that collapse internally, and the new standards hold up. This general approach allows Kierkegaard to sketch a Kantian reductio of religious nonbelief. However, he appears to follow Schelling in taking Kant’s critique of the ontological argument for God’s existence to show that being is not a predicate, and that thought and being, possibility and actuality, are therefore heterogeneous. Whether or not something exists is then a contingent matter that cannot be known a priori.

This chapter engages with the contributions of Indigenous peoples in North America to a jurisprudence of entanglement, as expressed through historic treaties between colonists and Indigenous peoples. A prevalent contemporary view understands treaties as a form of negotiated co-existence in which, contract-like, different parties agree to exchange – or share – land, resources and jurisdiction. Treaties could thus be seen to provide interface norms for two legal orders, otherwise strangers to each other, which might now become entangled. However, a body of Indigenous scholarship on the resurgent treaty tradition shows up the liberal philosophical premises embedded in this understanding of legal pluralism and the entanglement of norms. Instead, from this perspective, treaties are a recognition that we are always and already in relationship. Further, the key tenets of that principle are that relationships themselves emerge from the more primal way our lifeworld is made up of symbiotic ecosystems. Entanglement in the context of treaties is thus a phenomenon of a different order than conventional legal pluralism: it is simply characteristic of an ontology of which law is a part. The larger implications of this for an ecologically grounded law are explored in conversation with occidental philosophies of entanglement.