AN AAI9102339
AU Richter, Kent Eugene.
TI THE RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY OF JAKOB FRIES (EPISTEMOLOGY).
IN Thesis (PH.D.)--STANFORD UNIVERSITY, 1990, 351p.
DD Order Number: AAI9102339.
SO Dissertation Abstracts International. Volume: 51-08, Section: A, page: 2777.
AB The purpose of this study is to present in some detail the philosophical foundations of Fries's conception of religious belief and religious feeling. In the Introduction, I define the driving problematic behind this religious epistemology as the need to produce a critique of reason that would provide a rigorous philosophical justification for both religious ideas and religious emotion. The definition and interrelation of these two aspects of human religious consciousness, I argue, was a prominent problem in post-Kantian German philosophy and a particularly important issue for Fries personally.
The body of the dissertation develops linearly from his general Kantian justification of human cognition to the final nature of religious consciousness as expressed in positive religion. The presentation has two parts: a statement of Fries's general epistemology and an exposition of the specifically religious aspects of human cognition that he characterized as belief and aesthetic sense. <>In the first section, I give only the necessary details of the Friesian critique of reason. I devote a little space to a presentation of the Kantian transcendental deduction of the categories of the understanding in order to see how Fries used and deviated from this model. The ultimate purpose of the first section is to show how he attempted to provide a critique of reason along Kantian lines, yet one capable of justifying not only the concepts of empirical knowledge, but also the ideas and aesthetic categories that constitute religion.
The second section shows how Fries applied his unique critical method in order to deduce both the pure rational ideas and the aesthetic ideas as necessary parts of his theory of reason. I show how the pure ideas are deduced, how they are necessarily related to ethics, and how they must also be related to the aesthetic ideas in order to become truly and fully religious. I then provide an explanation of how belief and aesthetic sense, having been grounded in a critique of reason as the ideal discursive and the aesthetic non-discursive aspects of religious consciousness, respectively, are united within a single consciousness and are manifested in positive religion. The dissertation culminates in an examination of Fries's own positive religion, Christianity, showing how central doctrines were affected by the Friesian epistemology.
DE Religion, General. Religion, Philosophy of. Philosophy.
AR Harvey, Van.
UP 9402. Revised: 931008.