SENIOR Faculty Fellow 1999-2000
Gary Gutting (Philosophy)
University of Notre Dame
Religion and Existential Phenomenology:
Marcel, Levinas, and Ricoeur
My current general research project is the history of French philosophy
in the twentieth century. One particularly neglected aspect of this
history has been the influence of religious belief on philosophical
thought. Especially since the rise of existential phenomenology
in the 1940s—and continuing through the poststructuralism
of the last thirty years—the mainline of French philosophical
thought (defined by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze,
and Lyotard) has largely excluded the great traditional issues of
religious faith. At the same time, it is well known that some important
figures in the history of existential phenomenology, particularly
Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur, have strong
religious interests and commitments. The project for my work at
the Erasmus Institute is a comparative and critical study of the
role of religion in the work of these three philosophers, with the
goal of reassessing the importance of religious themes for understanding
existential phenomenology.
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