Science of Being, Science of Faith

Abstract

This essay is a critical investigation of Heidegger's insistence on the absolute difference between philosophy, defined as fundamental ontology, and theology, understood as the science of faith. Focusing primarily on two important works from 1927, Phenomenology and Theology and Being and Time, I argue that the distinction between the two disciplines begins to blur in light of the circular character of hermeneutical understanding as Heidegger himself describes it. Ontology, he concedes, has ontic roots in the authentic self-understanding of Dasein. I maintain that this understanding involves an interpretive decision that, lacking the pure phenomenological rationality Heidegger attributes to it, looks much like the faith he would banish from philosophy.