Abstract

Martin Heidegger is an absolutely essential figure for all the thinkers treated in the second and third parts of the book. None of the contemporary “religious” phenomenologies would be possible or coherent without Heidegger’s thinking. This chapter does not survey Heidegger’s entire philosophy, but it explains certain fundamental concepts that are assumed by all the later thinkers, such as the notion of “ontological difference” and of metaphysics as “onto-theo-logy.” It deals with Heidegger’s contention that theology is an “ontic” science that is absolutely distinct from phenomenology or philosophy as an “ontological” thinking, as put forth in his early essay “Phenomenology and Theology.” It also considers the significance of Heidegger’s language of Being and his claim that the term has no place in a “theology,” especially as the status of ontological language becomes significant for several of the later thinkers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia and some of his late writings on the holy, the gods, and the Fourfold.

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