Page History

PDF Version of this Document

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.

...