According to a simple formulation of doxasticism about propositional faith, necessarily faith that p requires belief that p. Support of doxasticism is long-standing and was rarely a matter of dispute until William Alston (1996) proposed that that the content of propositional faith need not be believed if it is accepted. Subsequently non-doxastic theories that reject the belief requirement have proliferated and have come to dominate literature in the field. This paper aims to redress the balance by identifying a dilemma for (...) non-doxasticism that comes into view when we draw out the implications of non-doxasticism for the interpretation of affirmations of religious propositional faith. One horn of this dilemma commits non-doxasticists to hermeneutic fictionalism: a substantive, contentious and little explored theory about religious discourse. The other appears to render the affirmation of faith prima facie bullshitting, leading to problems about the integrity of religious discourse and its speakers. (shrink)

An important influence on Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology is the work of Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Marion is particularly interested in Balthasar’s ‘phenomenological’ approach to the content of Christian revelation, centered on the metaphor of the work of art. Balthasar suggests in his Theo-Logic that the early Marion ‘concede[s] too much to the critique of Heidegger,’ moving too far away from the ‘transcendental’ metaphysics of Aquinas and the classical tradition. Yet Balthasar’s criticism is premature. Rather, Marion’s work, particularly (...) his emphasis on the ‘saturated phenomenon,’ paves the way for a postmetaphysical theological aesthetics that might renew Balthasar’s project in a cultural situation ‘after’ the death of God, while simultaneously opening a space for Christian revelation apart from a certain hegemonic tradition of onto-theology. (shrink)

This article is an argument for furthering the understanding, role and scope of critical theology in reflection on the act, content and implications of theological thought through appropriation of...

Este artículo estudia la posibilidad de que la fenomenología haya dado el giro teológico al haber buscado en Dionisio Areopagita una salida al problema de la ontoteología. Tanto Lévinas como Henry y Marion se acercaron al proceso de la mística dionisiana para encontrar un camino , una ontología , y un encuentro con el fenómeno saturado.

Were I to give this paper a subtitle, it would be: “Revisiting the metaphor of the body as house”; and if I were to give it a sub-subtitle, it would be: “The back door, the front door, the bedroom, and the hole in the roof.” In the end I decided not to add these sub-titles, not only for the sake of sheer titular manageability, but also because, in doing so, a certain dualism of body and soul or spirit1 might be (...) thereby evoked. Of course, the image of the house as a metaphor for the body⎯a house in which the soul or the spirit dwells, in which perhaps it is even trapped⎯is a familiar one within the Western tradition. Nevertheless, I will be appealing here to the metaphor of the body as a house in the attempt to articulate an idea of God and of the self from within a phenomenology of the body⎯and in doing so, precisely challenging any such dualism. To begin with, by “body” I intend the lived body, bound up in some way with an ipseic phenomenality, itself inseparable from the “sensual” awareness of itself⎯and, of course, the word “sensual,” or “sensuality,” is what precisely is going to be at issue in revisiting the metaphor. Indeed, in the phenomenological literature of recent decades, the word “flesh” is often used to distinguish this ipseic and somehow “sensual” self-awareness from the merely objective body appearing in the world, one object among others, capable of being an object, to some extent, even for the soul or self that “inhabits” it.2 To that extent, if any dualism is to be identified here, it is less that of body and soul or spirit than that of “lived body” and “objective body” or “body object.”. (shrink)