Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

The New Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy of Religion

“…Against the Husserlian ‘principle of all principles’, that intuition or what might loosely be called ‘experience’ can only be given against a particular horizon (e.g., a spatio‐temporal horizon) and to a constituting ‘I’, Marion prefers to not place any a priori restrictions or conditions on what can be given or what form experience may take. And so, as he puts it: ‘It is forbidden to forbid!’ For Marion, we cannot rule out the possibility of there being at least some phenomena which are irreducible to an ‘I’ and break the bounds of all horizons and so constitute a ‘pure giveneness’ . But this does not render them inadmissible as objects of phenomenological analysis.…”

Ontological Commitment and Its Implication to Semantical Objects of Religious Language

“…Ayer through his famous philosophy, namely logical positivism in his famous work Language, Truth, and Logic and became a central topic in the discourse of the philosophy of religion through the mid-twentieth century. In continental Europe, the topic of religious language is also a quite crucial discussion (Jacques, 1989;Marion, 1994;Scott, 2017).…”

Faith, fictionalism and bullshit

“…Perhaps the most promising options are theories of religious affirmations that present them as non‐assertoric. For example, D. Z. Phillips () has been interpreted as proposing that religious affirmations are confessional acts rather than expressions of belief (Oppy & Trakakis, , p. 123) and more recently, Jacques Derrida () and Jean‐Luc Marion () have proposed that religious affirmations (at least those about God) can be understood as a form of non‐doxastic praise or prayer. However, while religious discourse clearly does include prayer, praise and confession, these theories provide no roadmap for how to interpret affirmations that are not in these contexts or where there is no identified addressee.…”