Philosophy and Religious Studies

In this paper, I explore the holism of Dewey's philosophy and its implications for a theory of knowledge and notions of objectivity. In the first part, I explain how this holism manifests itself in his concept of the continuum and how he is able to use this as a way of getting beyond the binaries of experience and reason, nature and culture, and the organism and its environment. This is an expression of the operational nature of his philosophy in which any divisions found are not meant to represent some essential difference between things but merely a conceptual convenience. In the second part, I show how these features redefine knowledge and objectivity. His account of knowledge moves away from an analogy with vision where a gulf is maintained between the knower and the object known towards an interactive account where knowledge is produced from a process of engagement between an organism and its environment. Furthermore, he is able to account for the influence of cultural mediation upon the production of knowledge and recognizes that the production of knowledge produces new relations within the matrix of culture. In this way, he is able to describe a reciprocal relationship between the production of knowledge and its place in culture. He also keeps this process circumscribed within its context. This leads to a notion of " objectivity " which is redefined in terms of the intersubjectivity of a particular culture rather than a value-free, ahistorical ideal.

This paper adds to the critical work on the relationship between Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Levinas by arguing that the experience of the face of the other can be made compatible with Jonas’s understanding of metabolism thus allowing for an extension of who counts as an other to include all organic life forms. Although this extension will allow for a broadening of ethical patients on one side, we will see that a corresponding broadening of ethical agents on the other side will prove to be more difficult owing to the exceptionality of the human being that they both maintain and believe is expressed through the experience of responsibility.

DOI: 10.5840/envirophil201851069

Following his newfound celebrity upon publication of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture in 1927 and 1928, titled “Phenomenology and Theology,” where he discussed how his recent groundbreaking work in existential phenomenology relates to Christian theology. Far from offering his philosophy as a method for theology, he instead attempted to utterly separate the two, setting the former as fundamental ontology and the latter as a positive science more akin to history, with the Christian faith as its positive object of study. The lecture was left unpublished until 1969, when Heidegger added an appendix, a piece exemplary of the later Heidegger’s thought. The point of this thesis is to properly expound the lecture and provide critique regarding his classification of theology as a positive science. Due to his existential description of Christian faith, his formula of theology as the study thereof sets that science as an ontology more akin to philosophy than he allows. Rather than correct this problem, it is more fitting to let stand Heidegger’s existential definition of faith and elucidate its consequences for Christian theological praxis. This leads to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Act and Being, a dissertation on the role of ontology in Christian theology which addresses Heidegger’s phenomenology. Bonhoeffer claims that the Cross event in Christianity requires a Christian existential analysis independent of Heidegger’s own analytic of pre-Christian Dasein. Here I conclude that this provides an opening for theological work in ontology, one which theologians must take if they wish to assert independence from and fruitfully engage with philosophy. I then provide an epilogue concerning the appendix, where I suggest the later Heidegger himself recognizes this need for theology, though only in a subtle manner.

Over the past fourteen centuries, Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390 C.E.) has been the subject of more than a dozen biographical narratives and monographs, beginning with the late antique hagiography of Gregory the Presbyter and concluding with the modern biography by John McGuckin. This is likely the result of Gregory’s vast autobiographical corpus, which has provided scholars with a chronological narrative and character perspective from which to start their own secondary narratives. By examining this tradition of biography, I argue that two trends remain regularly operative. First, each biographer has consistently endowed his subject with his own values, ideals, and theo- logical commitments. Second, each biography has given pride of place to Gregory’s autobiographical voice. To make a precise demonstration of the latter trend, I follow the notorious Maximus affair from its presentation in Gregory’s autobiography and in the biographical tradition, showing how Gregory’s narrative remains almost entirely intact and unscrutinized. Ultimately I contend that the generic boundaries between autobiography, hagiography, and biography have broken down and suggest that readers subject autobiographical texts, along with their content, structure, style, and narrative, to rhetor- ical analysis rather than treat them as texts that reveal, with varying degrees of transpar- ency, the authentic personality of their author.

The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings offers new translations of a wide range of materials from c.100 CE to c.650 CE, including many writings that have not previously been accessible in English. The volumes will focus on selected themes and will include translations of works originally written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, together with introductions, notes, bibliographies, and scriptural indices to aid the reader. Taken together they should greatly expand the range of texts available to scholars, students, and all who are interested in this period of Christian thought.

General Editors:

Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Mark DelCogliano, University of St Thomas, Minnesota
Ellen Muehlberger, University of Michigan
Bradley K. Storin, Louisiana State University