The opening chapter of Genesis makes a lofty claim about the human condition: that humans are created in the image of God. But why can humans image God? This article examines four different interpretations of humans as interpretive animals. Following Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein, I argue that humans are interpretive animals, and as such, are suitable creatures to bear God's image. Humans as interpretive animals function as the image of God, not because of divine fiat; instead, humans in their (...) capacities are open to being the image. My argument is not that the image of God is identifiable as particular human features. Instead, it is the fact that humans have specific capacities that make them interpretive animals (e.g., radical openness, thrownness, malleability) and that these traits are constitutive for what it means to be human. Alongside Heidegger, I draw on the works of Charles Taylor, Claudia Welz, and Kathryn Tanner. (shrink)

Phenomenological descriptions are supposed to be revelatory and coincide with the self-showing of the things themselves. These features of phenomenological descriptions lead to the peculiar character of their expression, which has the effect of making them difficult to communicate. That is, the problem with communicating the findings of phenomenological researches is a consequence of the descriptive nature of the endeavor and the disclosive character of phenomenological descriptions. In the Logical Investigations Edmund Husserl recognized that the problem has three facets: how (...) does one state the findings of phenomenological researches, how can one effectively communicate these findings, and how can these communications be persuasive? In this essay I elaborate on these problems and then show that Heidegger’s method of formal indication was designed to solve these problems just as Husserl understood them. We can thus take formal indication as a model for dealing with these problems—and for informing phenomenological discourse—because it solves them with a single strategy. (shrink)

The subjective experience of schizophrenia, its cause, and its course have been consistent topics of interest within the phenomenological tradition since its inception. After 80 years of study and the efforts of many investigators, however, phenomenological contributions have so far had only a modest impact on current understandings of this disorder. In this article, the author reviews the methodological and theoretical issues involved in the development of a phenomenological approach to understanding schizophrenia. Drawing examples from his own empirical research, the (...) author illustrates the three steps of description, understanding, and explanation required by an application of the phenomenological method to this empirical domain. He then considers obstacles to the acceptance of insights generated through this method by the mainstream psychiatric community. In conclusion, he suggests that the promise offered by a phenomenological approach will most likely be fulfilled when investigators appeal to the phenomenological conviction in intentionality to provide the guidelines for an empirical science of subjective life. (shrink)

This article accounts for Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of violence from the period of Being and Time. Violence is relevant for Heidegger in two different contexts: (i) methodological, where we speak of hermeneutic violence, and (ii) thematic, where we should speak of existential violence. The former is grounded in the latter. In the first part of the article, I analyze hermeneutic violence, showing that this concept is ambiguous, and one has to distinguish between two different meanings of it. In the second (...) part of the article, I show that at the core of the original sense lies the existential violence of bursting out of senselessness. In the final part, I contextualize Heidegger’s concept in light of the contemporary phenomenological developments of the phenomenon of violence, showing that existential violence is constitutive and has the peculiar character of being at the same time sense-destroying and sense-making. (shrink)