Safer Grbić

In this paper, aligning with the focus international researchers have dedicated to Heidegger's major works in order to contribute to the elucidation of his teachings, our intention is to establish a hypothesis grounded in Heidegger's secondary literature spanning his first, second, and third periods of thought. This will be accomplished through an examination of his speeches, presentations, lectures, correspondences, notes, interviews, and the like. Thus, the hypothesis of this paper is aimed at demonstrating that Heidegger's body of work does not constitute a static and definitive delineation of philosophy that commences and concludes in a prescribed manner: instead, it represents a contemplation of the concept of philosophy throughout his entire oeuvre, achieved by engaging in the discourse of philosophy, problematizing metaphysics, and scrutinizing ontology. In this vein, this essay delves into Heidegger's understanding of the relationship between philosophy and metaphysics during his first period of thought, his comprehension of the problem of metaphysics in his second period of thought, and his interpretation of the interplay between ontology and theology/teologics in his third period of thought. The ultimate objective is to shed light on Heidegger's methodology, which underpins both his initial phenomenology and subsequent thought: the method of posing questions. Specifically, the act of questioning has led to a critique of the obscuring of the ontological difference between Sein and Dasein, a critique that delivers an essential disruption to philosophical thought. Consequently, this underscores the necessity of establishing the foundations for the task of thinking.

In modern academic article repositories, we find many papers on what Heidegger thought, but few papers that attempt to decipher how Heidegger thought. This article purports to show one aspect of the “how?” question of Heidegger’s thought. In the works of interpreters, historians of philosophy and thinkers, the prevailing view is that the question of being is the central question of the “what?” of Heidegger’s thought. Since the question of “how?” is more original than the question of “what?”, and since the history of thought indicates that the content of thought is always thought according to a given system of thought, this paper aims to prove the hypothesis of a more original, primal, present, and continuous phenomenon than the question of being in Heidegger’s work; a phenomenon on which the question of battle itself is based. We can call this phenomenon “the dialectic of confrontations”. The task is to prove that the answer to the question “How?” is given by Heidegger’s thought in the dialectic of confrontation, by which the “shepherd of being” becomes the “shepherd of confrontations”.

This paper will show the following: the distinctions among belief, religious belief, religion, and theology as religious instruction in belief; an explication of the concept of religious conflicts; the (im)possibility of realizing the ideals of theological epistemology; and the view of religious conflicts as a clash of epistemologies. As a proposition that is presumed to be true so that it could be used in explaining certain facts or as a presumption based on facts, a hypothesis is reflected in the assumption that religious conflicts are realized as a clash of epistemologies if we move from the area of the phenomena with which religions generally operate onto the area of principles on the basis of which these phenomena are realized as such. Thus, religious conflicts will be observed on the basis of the question of theological epistemologies, which can be differentiated into three basic ones: theologia fundamentalis, which has a Revelation or a Sacred text as the source of faith; theologia rationalis, which has reason as the source of faith; and theologia spiritualis, which has a personal maturation or revelation as the source of faith. Although the topic of this paper is the concept of religious conflicts as a clash of epistemologies, there will also be given, as it turns out, a necessary consideration of specific religious phenomena, which are given as such on the basis of one of the theological epistemologies, in accordance with the necessity of understanding the phenomenal area in which religious conflicts are realized. Nevertheless, the main tendency of this paper remains the idea of a clash among theological epistemologies as the explication of religious conflicts.