Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation

by D. Z. Phillips

• ISBN13: 9780521008464
• ISBN10: 0521008468
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-09-10
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Leading philosopher of religion D. Z. Phillips argues that intellectuals need not see their task as being for or against religion, but as one of understanding it. What stands in the way of this task are certain methodological assumptions about what enquiry into religion must be. Beginning with Bernard Williams on Greek gods, Phillips goes on to examine these assumptions in the work of Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Frazer, Tylor, Marett, Freud, Durkheim, L_vy-Bruhl, Berger and Winch. The result exposes confusion, but also gives logical space to religious belief without advocating personal acceptance of that belief, and shows how the academic study of religion may return to the contemplative task of doing conceptual justice to the world. Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation extends in important ways D. Z. Phillips' seminal 1976 book Religion Without Explanation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and theology.

Author Biography

D. Z. Phillips is Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, California and Rush Rhees Research Professor in the University of Wales at Swansea

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgements	xi
Hermeneutics and the philosophical future of religious studies	1	(30)
The present contenders: the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion	1	(3)
The hermeneutics of contemplation	4	(4)
Beyond interpretation to contemplation	8	(9)
Beyond frameworks and grids to concept-formation	17	(6)
Suspicion about suspicion	23	(2)
The hermeneutics of contemplation and Wittgensteinian Fideism	25	(6)
Bernard Williams on the gods and us	31	(24)
Hermeneutics and modernity	31	(2)
Assumptions about the gods	33	(6)
Questioning the assumptions	39	(16)
Hume's legacy	55	(32)
Hume and hermeneutics	55	(2)
Hume's first level of criticism	57	(8)
Hume's second level of criticism	65	(2)
Hume's third level of criticism	67	(2)
Hume's `true religion'	69	(4)
Hume on miracles	73	(5)
Beyond design to a song of creation	78	(2)
Hume's one-sided diet	80	(3)
Hume and us	83	(4)
Feuerbach: religion's secret?	87	(43)
Feuerbach and demystification	87	(5)
God among the predicates	92	(7)
God and the human species	99	(6)
Contradiction and contemplation	105	(7)
Death and finitude	112	(4)
Contemplating reactions to death	116	(10)
God and death	126	(2)
Conclusions about death	128	(2)
Marx and Engels: religion, alienation and compensation	130	(16)
Marxism and monism	130	(10)
Religion and ideology	140	(6)
Tylor and Frazer: are religious beliefs mistaken hypotheses?	146	(37)
Animism and intellectualism	146	(5)
Animism, souls and spirits	151	(11)
What rituals can be	162	(5)
Rituals and the mythology in our language	167	(10)
Rituals and explanations	177	(6)
Marett: primitive reactions	183	(16)
Marett and anti-intellectualism	183	(3)
Marett and suspicion	186	(4)
In the beginning was the dance	190	(5)
Marett's other course	195	(4)
Freud: the battle for `earliest' things	199	(30)
Contemplation of `earliest' things	199	(3)
`The unconscious' and conditions of intelligibility	202	(2)
Religion and the three conditions of intelligibility	204	(4)
Freud's monistic vision	208	(7)
Freud's monism and cultural movements	215	(3)
Freud's blind spots	218	(8)
Psychoanalysis and religion	226	(3)
Durkheim: religion as a social construct	229	(18)
Anti-animism	229	(3)
The science without a subject	232	(3)
Social solidarity: a case of logical inversion	235	(7)
Social constructs and independent realities	242	(5)
Levy-Bruhl: primitive logic	247	(20)
`Prelogical thought'	247	(5)
Can we understand magico-religious beliefs?	252	(7)
Lessons from Levy-Bruhl	259	(8)
Berger: the avoidance of discourse	267	(22)
Pluralism and marketing religion	267	(6)
Berger's sociological story	273	(4)
The fate of values and criticism	277	(3)
The fate of alienation and liberation	280	(5)
The language of sociology and the sociologising of language	285	(4)
Winch: trying to understand	289	(29)
Language, belief and reality	289	(5)
Understanding a primitive culture	294	(10)
Extending our understanding	304	(7)
Whose understanding?	311	(7)
Understanding: a philosophical vocation	318	(9)
A problem for contemplative philosophy	318	(2)
A philosophical imperative	320	(7)
Index of names	327	(2)
Index of subjects	329