Search Results (30)

The contribution of this paper lies in its extension of the phenomenological insights of Martin Buber and Jean-Luc Marion—in particular, Buber’s philosophy of dialogue and the I–thou relation, and Marion’s articulation of saturated phenomenality—to the unique context of the relation between a spiritual Master and a disciple. The author of this paper is the disciple in question, such that a certain autobiographical dimension to the analysis is inevitable and even necessary. From this it follows that the analysis presented in no way aspires to apply universally to all Master–disciple relationships, though some generality may be possible to the extent that both Buber’s and Marion’s phenomenological insights may be generalizable to some degree. At heart, what is hoped is that the thick phenomenological descriptions contained in the analysis, expressions of a sustained application of the work of Buber and Marion to a unique context, will be of interest to the reader. Full article

This article explores the possibility of conceiving political theology beyond its traditional metaphysical foundations. Starting from Carl Schmitt’s formulation of political theology as a domain rooted in analogical and representational transfers between the theological and the political, and drawing on Jean-Luc Marion’s critique of metaphysical theology, or onto-theology, this paper interrogates the foundational assumptions of Schmitt’s political theology and assesses the viability of a non-metaphysical theo-political discourse. The article has three main aims: to elucidate the representational logic at the core of Schmitt’s political theology; to examine postmetaphysical theo-political discourses in light of Marion’s deconstruction of onto-theology; and to vindicate the legitimacy and coherence of postmodern theological-political approaches. Taking inspiration from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s threefold theological method—affirmation, negation, and eminence—the article argues that contemporary political theology can be reframed accordingly: (1) the path of affirmation aligns with Vatter’s reading of Schmitt; (2) the path of negation resonates with Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive strategy; and (3) the path of eminence finds its expression in Marion’s phenomenology of givenness. Ultimately, this paper contends that Marion’s phenomenological approach opens a productive avenue for reconceiving theo-political discourse; it is argued that the phenomenology of givenness proposed by Marion to surpass the conceptual idols of metaphysics has significant implications for the theo-political field that remain unexplored. Full article

This article proposes a reading of Marion’s phenomenology from an early text, arguing that the various phenomenological innovations which are introduced in this work are subordinated to the central concept of transcendence. This concept in Marion’s work names the relation between revelation and experience and makes possible the disclosure of a revelatory phenomenon of radical alterity and asymmetry. Reliant on this concept, Marion’s phenomenology dramatically reconfigures the transcendental subject, the phenomenal object, and the horizon as well as their relation to certain phenomena. While Marion’s early text undergoes numerous revisions and reappears in different versions at several junctures in the development of his intervention in phenomenology, this article maintains that his central concept of transcendence retains its primacy in the structural arrangement of his other phenomenological innovations. Additionally, it will be argued that while the concept of transcendence in Marion has often been treated with suspicion by interpreters as obliquely allowing for a theological incursion into Marion’s phenomenology, such discussions generally miss how Marion’s particular construal of transcendence, as the relation between revelation and experience, necessarily allows for an a priori best explained as a theological judgement. Lastly, several questions attendant to this argument will be suggested for further development and investigation. Full article

A central question within contemporary debates about the structure of self-love concerns the place and status of the other. Is self-love identical to, or at least vulnerable to, the accusation of self-absorption and narcissism? Whereas contemporary critiques of self-love argue self-love is in principle impossible, the present essay suggests that self-love can be integrated with the love of the other at an a priori level. This material a priori, distinct from the Kantian formal a priori, entails resources such as commitment to myself, to the other, and to us as relational unit, as well as to the enforcement of boundaries that protects against acts of injury and abuse instigated against that relational unit; I suggest such resources overcome the charge of narcissism levelled at the very idea of self-love. Prior to that, a brief contextual discussion of key moves about philosophical anthropology, focused on the concept of the monad in Leibniz, Husserl and its extreme repudiation in Jean-Luc Marion, is to be addressed. Finally I assess the intimate relationship between self-love and the love of the other inspired in large part by Augustine’s anthropology. Full article

Whereas Marion’s earlier articulation of givenness has received a wide-spread hermeneutical critic justifiable within the framework of his two major initial texts on the issue (“Reduction and Givenness” and “Being Given”), in recent works he has reacted in diverse writings in view of repositioning hermeneutics within his phenomenology of givenness. Following Gadamer and Heidegger, this reaction culminated in the outline of an enigmatic structure of givenness where understanding is situated within the dynamic of call and response (Levinas, Chrétien). Yet, despite the reciprocity of call and response in hermeneutical understanding, Marion still seems to have reinforced his previous position in which meaning is that of the sole givenness, thereby compromising the point of view of the witness (the hermeneutic gaze). We shall defend not only this “hermeneutic gaze”—which is rooted in the symbolic ground of the witness as what s/he brings to bear on what is received in a network of relationships that transforms him,—but also demonstrate how the reciprocity between givenness and the gifted dynamically plays out in call and response (St. Paul). In addition, the hermeneutic gaze is indispensable since only it can explain an illusion that cohabits with givenness, i.e., with the phenomena. In the context of religious experience, the hermeneutical gaze is capable of modulating the way the divine word (aesthetic) is given: either as an illusion (ecstatic), which reverts him back to himself, or as meaning, which inscribes him into a faith community (symbolic). Full article

On its seventeenth centenary, I seek to reassess the theological significance of the Nicene Creed, drawing inspiration from Athanasius, who came to see the Creed as a privileged transmission of the apostolic teaching based on the Revelation granted by Christ. I attempt to bring into focus the nature of Revelation, referring to Karl Barth and Jean-Luc Marion. Criticizing the deflationary approach to Nicaea and Athanasius, which has been common of late, I read the layers of meaning in the Creed with special attention to the way the Creed builds on Johannine themes, and I reassess its ousia language. Full article

This essay examines Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenal model of the Trinity expounded in his recent book D’Ailleurs, la révélation (2020) and attempts to give an initial assessment from a theological perspective. Since Marion’s programme is largely indebted to the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar’s own project, first I give an overview of the Balthasarian phenomenal approach to revelation famously termed “aesthetic theology”. Next, I present Marion’s ideas concerning the convergence between the phenomenological and the theological enterprise. The third part examines the theological rationale behind Marion’s phenomenal model of the Trinity that again can be seen as relying significantly on Balthasarian trinitarian theology. In this section, I give an overview of the idea of the relationship between the immanent and the economic Trinity, and I inspect notions, such as trinitarian distance, kenosis and Marion’s own concept elsewhere. The fourth section gives an outline of Marion’s phenomenal model of the trinity where he develops a new trinitarian triad based on a phenomenal approach. The closing section reflects on the advantages and difficulties of Marion’s project. Full article

For more than two decades, the phenomenologies of revelation emerging from twentieth century French philosophy have met a North American reception framed largely within the context of a hermeneutic critique. This essay seeks to intervene in this situation by developing Jean-Luc Marion’s own sketch of a phenomenological hermeneutics and putting it in dialogue with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of language in Truth and Method. Thus, in an attempt to further develop Marion’s phenomenological hermeneutics of ‘giving’ and ‘showing’, a space is opened for Gadamer’s notion of ‘saying’. As a result, in the midst of the horizon opened by language itself, the ‘impossible’ phenomenality of revelation shines forth. Full article

The article first exposes a section in Edith Stein’s masterwork, Finite and Eternal Being, where she explicitly reflects upon the relation between philosophy and theology, and on the possibility of a Christian philosophy. Here, Stein enlarges the scope of rationality when propagating faith as a source of knowledge in its own right. The phenomenological first-person perspective and notions of intention and fulfillment help to elucidate the different ways of getting to know God, finding its utmost source in the lived mystical experience. Despite including theological content in her phenomenological analysis, Stein proposes a possible “common ground” where the non-believer is also invited to join in an epistemological effort. This proposition, I suggest, is pointing forward to the contributions of the so-called “new phenomenologists” of the last half-century, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion being examples of how theology and philosophy, though separate, may enrich each other. Full article

Liturgical renewal has emphasized the partnership of preaching and Eucharist. What does this partnership look like in the new reality of remote preaching and worship? The church has largely ignored this partnership in conversations about remote worship. Official statements treat preaching as necessary while discouraging or forbidding remote celebrations of the Eucharist. The work of pre-pandemic theologians to foster this partnership suggests that not only is remote Eucharist possible, but it is preferable to holding remote worship without Eucharist. This article makes that claim, emphasizing preaching and Eucharist as two pieces of a single liturgical action. In doing so, it breaks with theologians who emphasized the partnership between preaching and Eucharist before the pandemic but have opposed remote Eucharist once it was being practiced widely. Full article

If a new generation of phenomenologists (Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-François Courtine) in France sought to overcome the “methodic atheism” imposed on the phenomenological method by the fathers of phenomenology, it was at the price of going beyond experience immanent to existence which targeted the invisible, and therefore of lacking a discourse on the critical restriction of the phenomenological method and on the points of contact between phenomenology and theology. The task of this paper is to show how this lack is overcome by Marc Richir’s “quasi theology” viewed from his articulation of the relationship between the phenomenological and the symbolical. This paper argues that whereas for the new French phenomenologists it is usually a question of a subreptitious crossing from one discipline to another, in Richir, what we have is an enigmatic relationship of the overlap between phenomenology and the symbolical. While Richir was only interested in the articulation of the relationship between the phenomenological, the symbolical and the absolute transcendence, his thoughts motivate us to explore, following Emmanuel Falque’s approach, the reciprocal transformation between phenomenology and theology. The paper concludes, on the one hand, that experience remains the immanent ground for phenomenology and theological science and, on the other, that Richir’s approach could be understood as a “metaphysical phenomenology”. Full article

The present article analyzes the relationship between phenomenology and theology, starting from some examples of the phenomenology of prayer. First, the article presents the phenomenology of prayer in the writings of phenomenologists such as Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Christina Gschwandtner and Natalie Depraz, indicating that the type of phenomenology and its relationship with theology influence the way in which they approach the theme of prayer. Second, the paper proposes a systematization of prayer, starting from the personal pronouns uttered when praying: I, you (thou) and he. “I” sees oneself as being called by God to a transfiguration which is impossible through one’s own powers and visible in the experience of the plenitude and joy of prayer; “You” provides the predicative dimension of the discourse and reveals communion either with God or, in the case of liturgy, with others; “He”, used less frequently in prayer, can constitute a source for a later theoretical discourse, being recognized as a “mysterious presence”. Following these analyses, the article concludes that there are two major relationships between phenomenology and theology: that of partial overlap, called theo-phenomenology, and that of rigorous delimitation. Regardless of the preferred model, the use of phenomenology for theology proves to be fruitful. Full article

In this paper I examine the relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics by reassessing the relationship between phenomenological and metaphysical transcendence. More specifically, I examine the notion of phenomenological transcendence in Husserl and the early Heidegger: Husserl defines transcendence primarily as the mode of givenness of phenomena that do not appear all at once, but must be given in partial profiles; Heidegger defines transcendence primarily as Dasein’s capacity to go beyond entities toward being. I argue that these divergent understandings of phenomenological transcendence have resulted in a significant difference in reception among French phenomenologists of religion. These thinkers assert that phenomenology, when properly conceived and utilized, can make room for the divine and its revelation, i.e., for a metaphysical transcendence. I further argue that these thinkers prefer Heidegger’s phenomenology to Husserl’s because they understand Heidegger’s transcendence as the subject’s openness to being, while they understand Husserl’s transcendence as a limit, as the inability to capture worldly objects. I take up Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness as a “case study” to illustrate this point. Finally, I argue that this preference for Heidegger over Husserl is misplaced and should be reversed. A close reading of Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life shows that Dasein is confined to its own possibilities and cannot be open to a relationship with the divine. By contrast, Husserl’s phenomenology provides the radical openness necessary to welcome revelation. While Husserl cannot envision a “worldly God,” the structures of horizonality and temporality characterize a subject capable of an authentic openness to revelation. Full article

In this article, I delineate a notion of phenomenology, which differs in many ways from earlier approaches. I term this understanding apocalyptic in the sense that this phenomenology discloses not only the essences of particular things, logical entities, ideas, and transcendental processes, but beyond them, it reveals reality in its essential openness to newness. The term apocalupsis refers not simply to the unveiling of something unknown earlier, but more importantly to the central determinant of reality in that it discloses irreducible newness. I show that the phenomenon of self-disclosure or revelation was at the center of the work of the first phenomenologists, such as Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl; I emphasize the notion of phenomenological revelation in the thought of Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger. In this context, I offer an interpretation of the phenomenologies of Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Henry, and Jean-Luc Marion. I argue that the notion of nouveauté novatrice of Miklos Vetö is a phenomenologically inspired insight into the nature of the essence of phenomenology. I claim that newness is the core of reality engendering a new conception of phenomenology as a philosophy of reality–a phenomenology aptly termed neology, a development of what is known as “the phenomenological movement”. Full article

ABCB11 is responsible for biliary bile acid secretion at the canalicular membrane of hepatocytes. Variations in the ABCB11 gene cause a spectrum of rare liver diseases. The most severe form is progressive familial intrahepatic cholestasis type 2 (PFIC2). Current medical treatments have limited efficacy. Here, we report the in vitro study of Abcb11 missense variants identified in PFIC2 patients and their functional rescue using cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator potentiators. Three ABCB11 disease-causing variations identified in PFIC2 patients (i.e., A257V, T463I and G562D) were reproduced in a plasmid encoding an Abcb11-green fluorescent protein. After transfection, the expression and localization of the variants were studied in HepG2 cells. Taurocholate transport activity and the effect of potentiators were studied in Madin–Darby canine kidney (MDCK) clones coexpressing Abcb11 and the sodium taurocholate cotransporting polypeptide (Ntcp/Slc10A1). As predicted using three-dimensional structure analysis, the three variants were expressed at the canalicular membrane but showed a defective function. Ivacaftor, GLP1837, SBC040 and SBC219 potentiators increased the bile acid transport of A257V and T463I and to a lesser extent, of G562D Abcb11 missense variants. In addition, a synergic effect was observed when ivacaftor was combined with SBC040 or SBC219. Such potentiators could represent new pharmacological approaches for improving the condition of patients with ABCB11 deficiency due to missense variations affecting the function of the transporter. Full article