Heidegger

allen scult wrote:

> I thought some people might be interested in a realization I came to
> while preparing the syllabus for a course entitled “Philosophy of
> Religion.”
>
> I was thinking anew about what a philosophy of religion might be. (I
> learned this approach from Heidegger.)
> What I came to is not as important as how I came to it. First I
> decided what I would like the course to be about, perhaps what I
> think it “should” be about philosophically; and then I figured out
> how to make philosophy out of my concern, my preoccupation with
> religion. My conclusion was that I needed to put it ( the idea I
> wanted to investigate)into the form of the question, “What is
> religion?” That is, what is the quality or characteristic that makes
> religion religion( akin to Socrates’ question in the Euthyphro: What
> is the characteristic that makes pious actions pious?
>
> Questioning religion in this way assumes that religion is fundamental
> to the being of Dasein, which seems to me the only way a philosopher
> can study a phenomenon, that is in the light of dasein’s seeing. How
> else could a philosopher investigate anything? It would be all up to
> the psychologists, and we all realize how dull that is.

no, we do not all realize how dull that would be.

indeed, I found the phenomenological/psychological approach taken by
James Fowler in _Stages of Faith_ far more insightful than an
philosophical attempt to define ‘religion’.

Joe

–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda

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 http://what-am-i.net
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Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 10:30 am
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