Self-Evidence or Sense of Self-Evidence?: Max Scheler

Abstract

Abstract While the other major contributions to the modern discourse on religion in the early twentieth century either had a Protestant or a secular Jewish background, Max Scheler not only was a Catholic but saw his own phenomenology-based understanding of religion as a fundamental renewal of the message of faith in a time of tremendous historical upheaval. This chapter asks whether Scheler, in his philosophy of religion, managed to go beyond the descriptive ascertainment of the fact that religious faith is based on feelings of self-evidence and succeeded in demonstrating the self-evidence of certain religious beliefs of a particular faith. This question is explored in both the philosophical and sociological fields and by contrasting Scheler’s ideas with pragmatist philosophy and theory of religion.