HYLOMORPHISM117Other moral theorists, following Kant’s
suggestion that the comparing of self to
the other is more likely to be the source of
the worst evils in the world than to have
any virtue, have sought a Kantian com-
parison of self with the demands of moral-
ity as the route to acquiring humility. None
of us could be without flaws in compari-
son with the strict demands of morality, so
the thought that some of us would emerge
from our self-analysis with magnanimity
is misguided. Instead, honest assessment
of self leads to a humbling of oneself or
acts as a restraint on the one hand (because
one recognizes that one always falls short
of the demands of morality) and, on the
other, an abiding respect for oneself
(because one recognizes oneself as the
source of moral reasons and demands in
the first place). Such a secular account of
humility, while abandoning the traditional
human / divine comparison, retains the
traditional belief in the equally limited
status of all humans.
HUSSERL, EDMUND (1859–1938). A
German philosopher, Husserl is widely
acknowledged as a founder of phenome-
nology. Phenomenology was the attempt
to find a new, scientific foundation for
philosophy based on careful descriptions
of the phenomena of experience. Husserl
was born Jewish and converted to Luther-
anism at age 27, and he later claimed to
be greatly influenced by Rudolf Otto’s
Die Heilige (1917). He himself published
almost nothing about religion, but phe-
nomenology has been seen as a promis-
ing route to understanding religion,
especially religious experience. Edith
Stein, Max Scheler, Paul Ricoeur, Emman-
uel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and Mer-
old Westphal are all philosophers who are
working explicitly in the tradition of Hus-
serlian phenomenology and who have
made important contributions to philos-
ophy of religion. His works include Logi-
cal Investigations (1900/01), Ideas
Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and
to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1913),
Cartesian Meditations (1931), and The
Crisis of the European Sciences and Tran-
scendental Phenomenology (1936).HUXLEY, T. H. (1825–1895). An early
defender of Darwinian evolution. He
denied being an atheist and coined the
term agnosticism, as describing his own
position of not claiming to know either
that God exists or that God does not exist.
His works include Man’s Place in Nature
(1864), Hume (1879), Collected Essays
9 vols. (1893–1894), Scientific Memoirs
5 vols. (1898–1903), and Life and Letters
3 vols. (ed. L. Huxley 1903).HYLOMORPHISM. The Aristotelian
view that objects consist of a form-matter
relationship. A horse has matter in the
way of bones, flesh, organs, and so on, but
the form horse is a whole, functioning
animal.