Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An Ontological Encounter

Allen Scult investigates being Jewish as embodying a way of understanding Heidegger’s attempt to deal with complications in his early phenomenology. The rhetorical capacity of sacred texts to bind to the reader’s identity in some transcendent way reveals the ontological relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics - between speaking and understanding. In tracing the dynamics of this relationship in Heideggerian and Jewish hermeneutics, Scult not only finds mutually enlightening points of contact between the two, but also uncovers significant ways in which Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is grounded in the lived experience of religion.