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Whereas I use Bultmann's phrase, "the 'right' philosophy" gladly because, on my use, it refers to both of philosophy's tasks -- its first, strictly analytic task, which, for me, as for Bultmann, includes its proper transcendental-metaphysical (or, as he would say, following Heidegger, "ontological") task; and philosophy's second, existential/ existentialist task of critically appropriating all "world views," "philosophies of life," "self-understandings"! / "understandings of existence," and so on -- he himself evidently uses it to refer solely to philosophy's first, strictly analytic task, understood as including an "existentialist analysis" of the self, others, and the transcendent. In other words, he does not allow, or, at any rate, seem to allow, for philosophy to address the existential question directly, even at the secondary, critically reflective (and in that sense indirect!) level at which it would alone be able to address it. To this extent, his own position, somewhat like D. Z. Phillips's, could be fairly characterized as a "fideist" position, according to which the last word on whether or not a given self-understanding/ understanding of existence, and so on, is valid is the word of
the person(s) deciding for or against it.

I find it ironic, therefore, that Bultmann should ever be accused (as he is, e.g., by Nygren) of having a "speculative," "metaphysical, "unscientific" understanding of philosophy. All one has to take seriously into account is Bultmann's obvious hostility toward Hegelianism -- in philosophy as well as theology -- to realize that employing an "unscientific" philosophy is the last thing he wants to encourage. In point of fact, his idea of "the 'right' philosophy," as distinct from mine, is not all that different from Nygren's own -- with the one important difference that Bultmann takes "analysis" sufficiently broadly to include what Heidegger and he both mean by "ontology." That is, he holds, as I also do, that there is a "core," or "center," to philosophy as well as a "periphery," in that, whatever particular context(s) of meaningmay meaning may be to the forefront, it is always one and the same self, others, and transcendence that are in the background as necessarily presupposed.

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