H Kim

In the present dissertation, I examine, critically reflect on, and evaluate D. Z. Phillips’ view of philosophy, religious language, religious truth, and God. One of the focuses is given to his attempts to overcome the dichotomy between the view of religious language as fact-asserting (realist) and as attitude-expressive (anti-realist), and between the understanding of religious truth as propositional truth and as personal truth. However, my focus is not limited to that issue alone. I attempt to grasp Phillips’ view of religious language, religious truth, and God as thoroughly as possible, since his view has been—too frequently—grossly misunderstood, and has attracted—often undue—criticisms from various sides. After that, on the basis of my understanding of Phillips, I make some suggestions for a more illuminating view of religious language, religious truth, and God. Phillips’ philosophical method, or way of doing philosophy is known as descriptive and contemplative. I examine central notions in his philosophy, such as description, contemplation, grammar, neutrality, and possibility. I also discuss scholarly debates on the relation between description and contemplation and the alleged shift in Phillips’ way of doing philosophy. In terms of religious language, Phillips’ several contentions are examined. He attempts to maintain the balance between the distinctiveness of religious language and its relation to other, non-religious aspects of human life. One of his central contentions regarding religious language is that the meaning of language is determined in the context of its use. For Phillips, the distinctiveness of religious language is shown in its specific characters, such as absolute (regulative), pictorial, grammatical, and expressive (confessional). While his view is often accused of attitude-expressivist, Phillips strongly rejects it. His position on the inexpressibility of God and the limits of human language and on the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical is also investigated. In regard to Phillips’ notion of religious truth, I explore its two major features. First, truth is context-dependent: not only the meaning but also the criteria of truth are to be found within the context in question. Second, religious truth is personal in the sense that it is a matter of personal decision and that it regulates a believer’s whole life. Despite the charge of relativism, his view does not necessarily lead to individualistic relativism, by virtue of the criteria of community and what we already know. Also, in terms of the charge of arbitrariness, Phillips’ account of our shared reactions to the world reveals not the arbitrariness but the contingency of our epistemic framework. For the reality of God, Phillips provides two kinds of analysis. First, in terms of the negative analysis—what the reality of God does not mean—he persistently emphasizes the difference between the reality of God and the reality of physical objects, and rejects metaphysical conceptions of God. Second, in terms of the positive analysis—what the reality of God does mean—Phillips argues that the existence of God is necessary existence; that God’s reality is synonymous with God’s divinity; and that the reality of God is spiritual reality. Also, Phillips rejects the charge of being Feuerbachian reductionist and attempts to go beyond the dichotomy between realism and nonrealism. The final chapter consists of two parts. In the first part, I address common criticisms of Phillips’ notion of the neutrality of contemplative philosophy. First, he has been criticized that despite his claim to neutrality, he is in reality a revisionist or a reformer who prescribes rather than describes. However, Wittgensteinian description, which Phillips employs, does have prescriptive force and thus the charge of revision or prescription could be less serious than is often thought. In terms of Phillips’ allegedly “one-sided diet,” I suggest, his Kierkegaardian-Weilian reading of Christianity needs not be taken as the grammar of religious beliefs; rather, Phillips offers it as an alternative account in his positive task of showing what religious belief does or may mean. Nevertheless, Phillips’ relying too much on that form of spirituality sometimes makes his accounts of religious beliefs less persuasive. Second, in terms of the question of whether neutrality is as attainable, desirable, or essential to philosophy as Phillips thinks it to be, his critics tend to take his notion of neutrality as a view from nowhere. However, I argue, the neutrality of contemplative philosophy is better understood as “trying to go nowhere.” Insofar as “a perch above the fray” of contemplative philosophy is construed as a third perspective from which a philosopher is looking for a way of describing the pros and cons of both the affirmation and the rejection of a position, contemplative philosophy is still a usable way of doing philosophy. In the second part, I suggest in what direction Phillips’ view can be further developed. First, a view of religious language based upon Phillips’ philosophy needs to involve more philosophical reflections on the structural inadequacies of human language, the ways in which language works in our talk of God, and, in this regard, the metaphorical character of religious language. Second, in terms of religious truth, I suggest two ways of deciding on the truth or rationality of a whole framework or worldview as such, despite the radical contingency of our epistemic framework: first, we can criticize or reject a framework by means of our context-internal criteria; second, the verification of the truth of a given worldview is experiential or practical. Finally, in terms of God, I argue that we need to pay more careful attention to and elucidate the grammar of the trinitarian conception of God, which is central to Christian religion.

이 글은 찰스 테일러가 말하고자 하는 인정이 어떠한 것인지를 밝히기 위한 목적으로 쓰여졌다. 테일러는 근대 세계의 문제들을 진단하고, 근대적 인간 주체가 의미가 거세된 얄팍한 삶을 살고 있음을 비판하며, 그 지점을 극복하기 위해서 “본래성의 윤리”가 필요함을 역설한다. 본래성의 윤리에 따르면, 인간 주체는 의미 있는 것, 중요한 것, 소중한 것, 가치 있는 것, 그러니까 선을 선택하고 지평으로 삼아서, 그 지평으로부터 삶의 의미를 부여해나가며 자신의 정체성을 획득해나간다. 그렇지만 이러한 선택의 범위는 제한되는데, 왜냐하면 인간의 삶이 이미 주어진 지평, 맥락에서 펼쳐지기 때문이다. 그런 점에서 인간의 삶 그리고 인간의 주체성 혹은 정체성은 타자들, 혹은 공동체와 무관하지 않다. 그리하여 인정의 중요성이 대두된다. 인정 없이 주체의 정체성은 형성될 수 없다. 다만 이러한 인정은 현대 사회가 한편으로는 평등을 추구한다는 점에서 다른 한편으로는 개성과 차이를 부각한다는 점에서 문제에 부딪친다. 인정은 평등한 인정과 차이의 인정 사이에서 어느 한쪽으로 기울어질 수 없고 그 사이에서 균형을 잡아야 한다. 그러한 균형을 생각해보려면, 테일러가 인정을 사유하며 어떻게 인간들 사이의 차이 혹은 비대칭성을 생각하고 있는지를 살펴볼 필요가 제기된다. 그러기 위해서 이 글은 리쾨르가 『인정의 여정』에서 제안한 “비대칭성의 망각의 발견”을 참조하려고 한다. “비대칭성의 망각의 발견”을 통해서, 테일러가 어떻게 차이와 비대칭적 관계에 대한 사유를 인정에 녹여내는지를 보여주려고 한다.

이 글의 목적은 부르디외의 ‘하비투스’ 개념에 제기되는 결정론의 의혹을 ‘기호적 창발’의 구조로 완화함으로써, 상징권력의 구조에 관한 자연주의적 탐구의 가능성을 제안하는 데 있다. 부르디외의 상징권력에는 하비투스의 이중성 즉, ‘구조화하는 구조’와 ‘구조화된 구조’의 논리가 내재되어 있는데, 그 이중성은 증여와 언어교환의 경험을 통해 확인될 수 있다. 그러나 하비투스의 이중적인 실천 논리가 함축하는 구조적 제약성과 그 작용 과정의 불투명성으로 인해, 아처나 킹과 같은 사회학자들은 부르디외의 사회학이 여전히 결정론 또는 유물론의 시각을 보여 준다고 분석한다. 이 문제에 필자는 하비투스의 제약성은 ‘몸’을 가진 유기체가 세계와 상호작용함으로써 반복적으로 경험하는 패턴들을 구조화하는 과정에서 드러나는 유연한 도식이라고 밝힌다. 이 글은 그 해명의 과정을 체험주의의 ‘영상도식’과 ‘기호적 창발’의 구조로 밝혀, 부르디외의 하비투스 개념에 제기되는 결정론에 대한 의혹을 완화하고, 상징권력에 관한 자연주의적인 탐구의 가능성을 보인다.

BackgroundThis study aimed to identify the healthcare providers’ experience and perspectives toward end-of-life care decisions focusing on end-of-life discussion and physician’s order of life-sustaining treatment documentation in Korea which are major parts of the Life-Sustaining Treatment Act.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted using a questionnaire developed by the authors. A total of 474 subjects—94 attending physicians, 87 resident physicians, and 293 nurses—participated in the survey, and the data analysis was performed in terms of frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation using the SPSS 24.0 program.ResultsStudy results showed that respondents were aware of terminal illness and physician’s order of life-sustaining treatment in Korea well enough except for some details. Physicians reported uncertainty in terminal state diagnosis and disease trajectory as the most challenging. Study participants regarded factors (related to relationships and communications) on the healthcare providers’ side as the major impediment to end-of-life discussion. Study respondents suggested that simplification of the process and more staff are required to facilitate end-of-life discussion and documentation.ConclusionBased on the study results, adequate education and training for better end-of-life discussion are required for future practice. Also, a simple and clear procedure for completing a physician’s order of life-sustaining treatment in Korea should be prepared and legal and ethical advice would be required. Since the enactment of the Life-Sustaining Treatment Act, several revisions already have been made including disease categories, thus continuous education to update and support clinicians is also called for.

There is no consensus concerning how to understand the ‘two-step proof structure’ (§§15–20, 21–7) of the Transcendental Deduction in the B-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This disagreement invites a closer examination of what Kant might have meant by a ‘transcendental deduction’. I argue that the transcendental deduction consists of three tasks that parallel Kant’s broader project of a ‘critique’ of pure reason; first, an origin task to justify reason’s authority to use them; second, an analytical task that determines the conditions under which this authority can be legitimately exercised; and third, a dialectical task to determine the conditions under which this authority cannot be legitimately exercised. So long as we continue to read the B-Deduction solely in terms of its two-step proof structure, we overlook how Kant’s notion of ‘critique’ constitutes the real grounds for his argumentative strategy there.

This study investigated the role of cross-linguistic influence in L2 learners’ integration of a verb and a construction during online English sentence processing. In a self-paced reading task, L1-English speakers and Chinese-L1 learners of English read the English double-object and prepositional dative constructions with verbs whose Chinese translation equivalents are either compatible or incompatible with each dative form. When including only a subset of trials for which participants provided expected translations for the target sentences (i.e., translating the English prepositional dative construction into a Chinese prepositional dative sentence and translating the English double-object construction into a Chinese double-object sentence), the effect of cross-linguistic influence emerged only in a certain type of verbs. When including all trials in the analysis, we found the effect of cross-linguistic influence for all verb types. These results provide some evidence that the cross-linguistic activation of verbs can influence verb-construction integration in L2 processing. The study highlights how bilingual co-activation of verbs extends beyond the lexical and structural levels to influence the integration of multiple sources of information.