DESCRIPTION: Sean Joseph McGrath (born 1966) is a Canadian philosopher and professor of philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is known for his published works in the history of philosophy and philosophy of religion. McGrath's publications fall broadly within the area known as continental philosophy, but with an interdisciplinary approach encompassing religion, ecology and depth psychology. Three areas dominate his work: philosophy of religion and Christian theology; philosophy of nature; philosophy of psychology. The text in question is a short article in which the author summarises his criticism of Martin Heidegger's position, which he formulated in detail in his books The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Catholic University of America Press, 2006) and Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Eerdmans, 2008). This criticism stems from ethical and theological issues and undermines Heidegger's key methodological distinction between ontological research and ontic discussions. McGrath argues that this distinction allows Heidegger to once again fill the ethical-theological horizon with assumptions that remain unexamined and, according to the terms of this distinction, unexaminable. These assumptions laid the foundation for Heidegger's politics in the 1930s and his theological influence on Catholic and Protestant theology in the second half of the 20th century. In conclusion, the author states that ontology can never be separated from ethical-theological issues, which are an integral part of it. "What is to be said about this? Insofar as Heidegger is in my view the greatest of all phenomenologists, his failure to keep his phenomenology clean of the ethico-theological is not insignificant. It is not merely a question of endeavoring post-Heidegger an even more methodological rigorous phenomenology, unless we are content to confine our phenomenological analyses to trivial objects, hammers for example. Heidegger’s problem indicates a flaw in the modern philosophical project itself, one that has been identified before, by anti-moderns such as Pascal, Jacobi, Kierkegaard, and Derrida. In spite of Heidegger’s many pretenses to have transcended modernity Heideggerian ontology is all too modern" (p.116).
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