Phenomenology of belief

Benedk Kanakappally is Lecturer in History and Phenomenology of Religions at the Pontifical Urbaniana University, Rome. He has a doctoral degree in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, and has previously taught Philosophy of Religion in India. His publications include several articles and books dealing with the history and the characteristic features of Indian religions.

Description

The question about religion is one that stubbornly refuses to go away. Rather than getting rid of religion, the secularization of societies has brought in its wake a heightened sense of the plurality of its expressions.

In this book, Benedict Kanakappally offers a thoroughgoing analysis of the thought of Karl Jaspers, whose contribution to a general clarification of the contemporary religious problematics has often gone unnoticed. A phenomenological review of man's belief in the reality of transcendence in its essentially constitutive aspects would show why religious plurality represents a legitimate state of affairs in the world. Apart from clarifying the grounds for religious plurality, this book is an attempt to unearth some of the interfaith dialogical motifs which belatedly came to dominate Jaspers' thinking.

Under the somewhat curious notion of his `philosophical faith' what Jaspers ultimately understands is a philosophical framework capable of serving as platform for a communicative encounter between different faiths. The book should appeal to those who are interested in the religious thought of Jaspers as well as to those who are interested in the broader issue of interreligious dialogue.