Phenomenology and the Holy: Religious Experience After Husserl

ISBN-13: 9780334043560 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 346 str.

Espen Dahl

Opis

SCM Veritas engages in critical and original questions of pressing concern to both philosophers and theologians. The major concern of all books in this series is to display a rigorous theological critique of categories not often thought to be theological in character, such as phenomenology or metaphysics which are mainly considered as philosophical categories.
All the books in this series aim to illustrate that without theology, something essential is lost in our accounts of such categories not only in the abstract but in the way in which we inhabit the world.
Phenomenology and the Holy is a study of the holy which attempts to find this both in the ordinary and in the sublime, thus challenging the reduction of the holy to a discrete and separated field of experience. Phenomenology is a key area of twentieth-century philosophy in which there is a wide interest, not only among philosophers but also among theologians and religious studies scholars.

Phenomenology and the Holy is a contribution to the phenomenology of religious experience based on phenomenological philosophy. Its aim is to overcome the traditionally conceived opposition between the profane everyday and the total otherness of the holy. This is carried out by means of a re-reading of Rudolf Otto and, more significantly, of Edmund Husserl against the backdrop of recent debates in continental philosophy of religion. By offering an understanding of the everyday as heterogeneous, inhabited by traces of the holy, on the one hand, and weakening the otherness of the holy, on the other, the dissertation attempts to relocate the holy within the interstices between the alien and familiar. By mapping the topology of the holy, its historical mediation, its vulnerability to marginalisation, and its role in the interplay between ordinary and cultic life, Husserls phenomenology still proves to be a fruitful resource in philosophy of religion. Espen Dahl has worked with phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy and their relevance for religion. He has studied and taught at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo.