Engaging and Disengaging Religion - Professor Gert-Jan van der Heiden скачать в хорошем качестве

Engaging and Disengaging Religion - Professor Gert-Jan van der Heiden

To show how the phenomenology of religion may be rescued from (some of) its critics by approaching it as a (well-understood) philosophical anthropology, I proceed in two steps. First, I aim to show how some of the 20th century hermeneutic-phenomenological accounts of the phenomenon of religion are already on their way to such an approach and, indeed, can in fact be understood as a pre-emptive rebuttal of or response to the criticisms at stake in the ‘theological turn’ of phenomenology and critical theory, respectively. I illustrate this by briefly developing the exemplary cases of Heidegger’s “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” and Ricoeur’s concern with a twofold hermeneutics of religion in the 1960s. While their perspectives are, in a sense, outdated by their emphasis on Christian religion alone, their hermeneutic-phenomenological approaches do offer a clear example of how the emic claims of a religion can be taken seriously and of how the combination of detachment and attachment – or: disengagement and engagement – exactly plays out in these respective phenomenological approaches to religion. Second, taking these exemplary cases as a guideline, I aim to develop in a more systematic way how a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach aims to see religion as a cultural expression or testimony of basic experiences of human life and existence that asks for both interpretation and critique, as the epistemological forms of engagement and disengagement. Professor Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology at Radabout University, Nijmegen. He examines problems from metaphysics and ontology in light of recent developments in phenomenology, hermeneutics and contemporary French thought. He is interested in the motive of speaking for the other in hermeneutics. He studies how the concept of contingency determines the landscape of contemporary ontology. With others he investigates why the Letters of Saint Paul are so often read in contemporary philosophy.