Felix Ó Murchadha

University of Galway | NUI Galway · Department of Philosophy

Eschatology is central to Christian theology: the significance of the death and resurrection of Christ is the promise of the “kingdom of God”. This paper takes up this idea in discussion with contemporary Christian theologians and discusses it phenomenologically by recourse to Husserl’s account of “horizon”. The horizon is both finite and infinite:...

This chapter explores listening through a phenomenological account of sound and rhythm, showing a musical structure in experience. This structure follows the rhythm of a sequence, leading the listener through an event of meaning that allows an other to appear as a self within a temporally constituted sequence of sense. While subject to such relatio...

Violence is essential to religion, while religion holds the promise of transcending violence. The designation religious refers not to a type of violence, but to a specific issue of violence, namely the claim to higher (theodical) justification. This religious aspect is not confined to religion; it is also evident in the secular domain. A critique o...

Violence tends to the destruction of meaningful entities and of that through which such entities are meaningful. Not all violence is annihilating in its effects, but violence aims towards a nothingness which discloses a certain fragility of meaning. The obliteration of the singular, the reduction of organic and structural unity to charred flesh and...

This paper shows how turns in theology in early Modernity and in the last century framed the context of distinct philosophical understandings of the self. Focusing on the concept of "pure nature," the foreshadowing of philosophical themes in theology is shown. It is further argued that while the modern self emerging from certain early Modern theolo...

This article presents an understanding of time and temporality as adverbial. In normal discourse we speak of time as a condition of action, thought, and events: to intervene in a timely fashion, to live anachronistically or to be before her time. Adverbially understood, time is experienced in terms of an oscillation between the timely and the untim...

Phenomenology speaks not directly of phenomena but rather of the appearing of phenomena. In so speaking it moves from the level of things with generic or proper names to the level of universal terms. In speaking and thinking the phenomenon Phenomenology comes “after” in the twofold sense of being too late and desiring for that which is to come. Thi...

In this chapter, Ó Murchadha asks where the philosopher stands in relation to violence. Philosophical explorations typically claim a standpoint of neutrality. Is neutrality a responsible position to take with respect to violence? Ó Murchadha argues that violence by its nature disallows disengagement: the very claim to disengagement participates in...

"Aesthetic Genesis", by Jeff Mitscherling, is a highly original and suggestive work, one which combines a powerful systematic thesis with a provocative overview of the history of philosophy and (to a lesser extent) of theology and science. In approaching this work, we wish to question some aspects of that historical account and in doing so, drawing...

Hermeneutics originates in the mediation of meaningful utterances understood as arising from a suprahuman, divine domain. The religious origin of hermeneutics is centrally connected with the history of Christianity both in the Patristic period, ending with St. Augustine, and in the modern era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Schleiermacher o...

The question of space is fundamentally a question of orientation: to take up space is to have a location facing toward or away from other places. Space is, in that sense, relative to a place, a location from which and toward which it is. In this directedness toward another place, every location is a place contingent to another. The contingency of p...

How does Christian philosophy address phenomena in the world? Felix Ó Murchadha believes that seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing the world through faith requires transcendence or thinking through glory and night (being and meaning). By challenging much of Western metaphysics, Ó Murchadha shows how phenomenology opens new ideas about being, and h...

In this paper I argue against the charge of quietism that Heidegger discovered in the comportment of waiting the conditions of political and ethical action in a time of crisis. I argue further that this discovery can properly be called phenomenological because it is both true to the basic virtue of phenomenology, namely patience, and responds to th...

This paper argues that the Husserl–Heidegger relationship is systematically misunderstood when framed in terms of a distinction between internalism and externalism. Both philosophers, it is argued, employ the phenomenological reduction to immanence as a fundamental methodological instrument. After first outlining the assumptions regarding inner and...

This article shows that Held's central philosophical concern is with the manner in which the withdrawal of world is apparent in kairological moments disclosed in fundamental moods. The phenomenology of world is for him a way of overcoming voluntarist nominalism. World is of its nature a limit to will and is experienced in the passivity of being act...

This chapter discusses divinity and alterity. Divinity and alterity have haunted phenomenology since its beginnings. The fourth reduction draws on these themes that are already to be found in Kearney's Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. The discussion poses three questions of Strangers, Gods and Monsters. The first is methodological, concerning the pla...

The terms of the title-glory, idolatry, kairos-are Christian, not Greek, if we understand Greek as the Greek of classical philosophy. Kairos is a Greek word meaning the opportune moment, but prior to Christianity it had little philosophical significance1; idolatry comes from eidolon, which in Plato means a deceiving image but in Christianity comes...

Etude de la scission du temps entre le moment, defini par la notion grecque de kairos et designant la discontinuite qui est a l'origine de la philosophique, d'une part, et la sequence du present, definie par la notion grecque de chronos et designant la continuite qui rend possible l'histoire, d'autre part. Soulevant la question de l'exclusion de l'...