Some fundamental aspects of the lived body only become evident when it breaks down through illness, weakness or pain. From a phenomenological point of view, various breakdowns are worth analyzing for their own sake, and discussing them also opens up overlooked dimensions of our bodily constitution. This book brings together different approaches that shed light on the phenomenology of the lived body-its normality and abnormality, health and sickness, its activity as well as its passivity. The contributors integrate phenomenological insights with discussions about bodily brokenness in philosophy, theology, medical science and literary theory. Phenomenology of the Broken Body demonstrates how the broken body sheds fresh light on the nuances of embodied experience in ordinary life and ultimately questions phenomenology's preunderstanding of the body.

This collection examines the relationship between Augustine and Wittgenstein and demonstrates the deep affinity they share, not only for the substantive issues they treat but also for the style of philosophizing they employ. Wittgenstein saw certain salient Augustinian approaches to concepts like language-learning, will, memory, and time as prompts for his own philosophical explorations, and he found great inspiration in Augustine's highly personalized and interlocutory style of writing philosophy. Each in his own way, in an effort to understand human experience more fully, adopts a mode of philosophizing that involves questioning, recognizing confusions, and confronting doubts. Beyond its bearing on such topics as language, meaning, knowledge, and will, their analysis extends to the nature of religious belief and its fundamental place in human experience. The essays collected here consider a broad range of themes, from issues regarding teaching, linguistic meaning, and self-understanding to miracles, ritual, and religion.

Some fundamental aspects of the lived body only become evident when it breaks down through illness, weakness or pain. From a phenomenological point of view, various breakdowns are worth analyzing for their own sake, and discussing them also opens up overlooked dimensions of our bodily constitution. This book brings together different approaches that shed light on the phenomenology of the lived body-its normality and abnormality, health and sickness, its activity as well as its passivity. The contributors integrate phenomenological insights with discussions about bodily brokenness in philosophy, theology, medical science and literary theory. Phenomenology of the Broken Body demonstrates how the broken body sheds fresh light on the nuances of embodied experience in ordinary life and ultimately questions phenomenology's preunderstanding of the body.

This collection examines the relationship between Augustine and Wittgenstein and demonstrates the deep affinity they share, not only for the substantive issues they treat but also for the style of philosophizing they employ. Wittgenstein saw certain salient Augustinian approaches to concepts like language-learning, will, memory, and time as prompts for his own philosophical explorations, and he found great inspiration in Augustine's highly personalized and interlocutory style of writing philosophy. Each in his own way, in an effort to understand human experience more fully, adopts a mode of philosophizing that involves questioning, recognizing confusions, and confronting doubts. Beyond its bearing on such topics as language, meaning, knowledge, and will, their analysis extends to the nature of religious belief and its fundamental place in human experience. The essays collected here consider a broad range of themes, from issues regarding teaching, linguistic meaning, and self-understanding to miracles, ritual, and religion.

This account of evil takes the Book of Job as its guide. The Book of Job considers physical pain, social bereavement, the origin of evil, theodicy, justice, divine violence, and reward. Such problems are explored by consulting ancient and modern accounts from the fields of theology and philosophy, broadly conceived. Some of the literature on evil - especially the philosophical literature - is inclined toward the abstract treatment of such problems. Bringing along the suffering Job will serve as a reminder of the concrete, lived experience in which the problem of evil has its roots.

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell (b. 1926) is a secular Jew who by his own admission is obsessed with Christ, yet his outlook on religion in general is ambiguous. Probing the secular and the sacred in Cavell s thought, Espen Dahl explains that Cavell, while often parting ways with Christianity, cannot dismiss it either. Focusing on Cavell's work as a whole, but especially on his recent engagement with Continental philosophy, Dahl brings out important themes in Cavell s philosophy and his conversation with theology."

Thanks to the recent "return to religion", the holy has become a relevant issue in public debate, as is suggested by concepts such as "re-sacralization" and "re-enchantment". Holy war and religiously motivated terrorist attacks, the fascination in popular culture for subjects such as the Holy Grail (as in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code), new spiritual longings both within and outside institutional religion - all testify to the new religious climate. This situation calls for a reassessment of both classical and new theories about the holy. Espen Dahl offers a theoretical account of the holy. Central to its approach is the idea that the holy cannot be reduced to one stable essence, but is fundamentally composite and takes place "in between". This means that the typical modern dichotomies between the holy and the profane, the pure and the impure, the pious and the violent, cannot be drawn as sharply as scholars once did. Instead, the manifestation of the holy takes place in the interstice between those spheres. Such a position is not strong - it attests to the weakness of the holy. Through a critical dialogue with the most influential recent contributions, various theories and responses to them are presented on the basis of the book's overall perspective. Espen Dahl deals with various theoretical perspectives, corresponding to the numerous dimensions of the holy. Phenomenology plays the principal role, because it offers the best means to preserve the experiential dimensions which are essential to the holy. From this perspective, the book discusses theories from religious science, theology, philosophy, and psychology.

Phenomenology and the Holy is a contribution to the phenomenology of religious experience based on phenomenological philosophy. Its aim is to overcome the traditionally conceived opposition between the profane everyday and the total otherness of the holy. This is carried out by means of a re-reading of Rudolf Otto and, more significantly, of Edmund Husserl against the backdrop of recent debates in continental philosophy of religion. By offering an understanding of the everyday as heterogeneous, inhabited by traces of the holy, on the one hand, and weakening the otherness of the holy, on the other, the dissertation attempts to relocate the holy within the interstices between the alien and familiar. By mapping the topology of the holy, its historical mediation, its vulnerability to marginalisation, and its role in the interplay between ordinary and cultic life, Husserl's phenomenology still proves to be a fruitful resource in philosophy of religion. Espen Dahl has worked with phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy and their relevance for religion. He has studied and taught at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo.