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Rescuing Rudolf Bultmann from Heidegger's shadow, Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere presents a philosophical reading of his theology, which reveals his unique phenomenology of love as an event.

Bultmann (1884-1976) is often regarded as a mere footnote to Heidegger's philosophy: a theologian whose thought was principally built on the Heideggerian analytic of human finitude. Yet, by reading Bultmann anew, in light of other continental philosophers' engagement with Heidegger – from Jaspers and Levinas to Ricœur and Falque – this book rejects that idea as a misunderstanding. Instead it contends that Bultmann radically develops and even improves upon Heidegger's phenomenology.

Guiding the reader through his argument in a clear and compelling style, Cassidy-Deketelaere reveals how Bultmann understands the experience of love as not being limited to an empirical occurrence but rather having a truly transcendental scope: what phenomenologists would now call 'event'. With this, Bultmann's theology not only resolves the contemporary critique of Heidegger's method as precluding a dynamic between the empirical and transcendental, but further provides a new alternative paradigm of human finitude based on love, and not death (Heidegger) or birth (Arendt).

Far more than a footnote, The Phenomenology of Love as Event uncovers Bultmann's significant contribution to philosophy. Through his theological writings, Bultmann shows us that love is the central experience of human existence, one that transforms the being of Dasein, despite Heidegger never allowing for it.

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Table of Contents

Preface, Claude Romano
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Philosophy of Rudolf Bultmann
Part I: Existentialism: John Macquarrie and Martin Heidegger
1. The Project of an Existentialist Theology
2. The Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann
3. The Poverty of the Empirical
Part II: Hermeneutics: Paul Ricœur and Karl Jaspers
4. A Lutheran Hermeneutics of the Event
5. The Interpretation of Faith
6. The Limits of Faith
Part III: Lutheran Neo-Kantianism: The Marburg School
7. Bultmann and the Intellectual Life of Marburg
8. The Logical Idealism of Cohen and Natorp
9. Herrmann's Lutheran Anthropology
Part IV: Phenomenology: Towards an Eschatological Ontology of Love
10. The Eschatological Event
11. The Transcendental Scope of Experience
12. The Being of Love
Conclusion: The Finitude of Love
References
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 11 Dec 2025
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 280
ISBN 9781350538917
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere

Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere is a Research Fellow…

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