Speaking and Thinking about God in Rosenzweig and Heidegger

In the early twentieth century, many philosophers began to reject Kantian and Hegelian approaches to the question of God and the philosophy of religion. The challenge was then to formulate a new way of talking about God within philosophy without necessarily having to revert to pre-modern accounts. These thinkers saw the importance of retaining the insights of modernity while also taking into account the Romantic and post-Romantic critiques of modernism as a one-sided or overly rationalistic enterprise.;This dissertation seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of the approaches of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger to rethinking the question of how philosophy is to proceed, especially in light of religious phenomena. Placing Rosenzweig and Heidegger in dialogue helps to further our understanding of both figures, particularly insofar as Rosenzweig's thought might be used as a corrective to possible shortcomings in the later Heidegger. Many scholars have argued that there is something problematic about Heidegger's religious thought, but Rosenzweig has been almost completely overlooked as an important corrective resource. Both Rosenzweig's comprehensive account of the basic phenomena of human existence and his grammatical method for formulating this account share many of Heidegger's insights, yet surpass them insofar as Rosenzweig is able to address the topic in a more philosophically cogent manner.;Rosenzweig's approach helps to illustrate that the mature Heidegger's de-emphasizing of divine revelation in favor of the self-revealing of Being and the "flight of the gods" is ultimately too selective an approach to the phenomena in question, and too narrow in its historical focus on German and pagan Greek thought. Rosenzweig's articulation of what he takes to be the historically concrete event of divine revelation, and the form of life that ensues therefrom, is thus a position that Heidegger should take seriously. Rosenzweig's philosophical speech-thinking serves to articulate concretely lived Biblical revelation in a way that provides a particularly helpful example of what Heidegger was grasping towards in his mature attempts to go beyond traditional metaphysical language.