ABSTRACT
The death of Dewi Phillips in 2006 meant the loss to philosophy of a distinctive and highly articulate voice; one committed to showing the power of careful attention to language to reveal the structure of human thought and practice. Over the period of his career academic philosophy became increasingly dominated by theoretical modes of understanding, yet Phillips persisted in the method of cultural phenomenology directed upon word and deed; attending to the particularities of experience and practice, not antecedently presuming to find systematicity there, or supposing that human meaning and value require scientific or ontological underpinnings. Given that metaphysics is generally associated with the project of determin-
ing the structure of reality beyond or beneath the domain of human experience, and of late with a scientifically inspired model of that project, it would certainly be misleading to describe Phillips’s philosophy as ‘metaphysical’. It might be thought to be equally misleading to describe it as ‘theological’, given that theology has long been associated with similarly transcendentalist aspirations, and also with a style of abstract theorizing that at times has aspired to being another kind of science. Yet while Phillips was not a theologian in the dogmatic or systematic sense his thought on topics within the field of religion was generally more in line with modern theologians than with modern philosophers. An example, relevant to what follows, is the resemblance between Phillips’s
account of the idea of immortality as that which relates to the human concern for meaning and to the realities of religion, and the views advanced at the end of the eighteenth century by Friedrich Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers. He writes:
If our feeling nowhere attaches itself to the individual, but if its content is our relation to God wherein all that is individual and fleeting disappears there can be nothing fleeting in it, but all must be eternal. In the religious life then we may well say we have already offered up and disposed of all that is mortal, and that we are actually enjoying immortality.…
[T]he true nature of religion is neither this idea [of God as one single being outside of the world and behind the world] nor any other, but immediate consciousness of the Deity as He is found in ourselves and in the world. Similarly the goal and character of the religious life is not the immortality that is outside time, behind it or rather after it, and which still is in time. It is the immortality which we can have in this temporal life.1
