introductionreligious as such, its experience and articulation. It was also an
experiment in a new kind of intellectual dialogue between philosophy
and Christian theology which especially in the Swedish situation was
something quite novel. But the core of the problematic had to do with
the critical articulation of religious experience, as exemplified mostly,
but not exclusively, to the Judeo-Christian tradition. In naming the
encounter “New Frontiers” the question of limits and borders was
highlighted. The point of the contributions and discussions was not
to secure and establish borders, but rather to negotiate, displace, and
explore new borders and border zones. In the face of a rising religious
fundamentalism, it is more important than ever to develop the means
of a critical and self-critical rationality that can bring to articulation
the fundamental existential, linguistic and spiritual predicaments of
the human subject in a non-exclusive sense. Herein lies the great
promise and possibility of phenomenology, that it can through its very
questioning of a realist or naturalist metaphysics, open itself to the
articulation of such limit experiences.
Among the key themes in such an exploration is the dichotomy of
immanence and transcendence, which obtains a central place in
Husserlian phenomenology, and which continues to be renegotiated
throughout the continued development of phenomenological and
post-phenomenological philosophy. If phenomenology is the study of
immanence, of that which presents itself to consciousness, what role
can transcendence play in a phenomenological analysis? Is not
transcendence, both in its realist and its metaphysical and theological
sense, precisely that which phenomenology can not handle? Or is it in
fact only through a consistent phenomenological analysis that the true
meaning and significance of transcendence can be interpreted? The
move from a positing and constituting subjectivity and its correlated
object to a subjectivity which understands itself ultimately as the
recipient of being as gift and event is not simply a move away from
orthodox phenomenology, but a movement within its own interior
logic, which at the same time transforms some of its basic categories.
But the critical discussion of the ultimate legitimacy of these
transgressive movements in the direction of the radically transcendent
and other, is precisely what defines contemporary phenomenological
research, which comes forth very clearly in several of the contributions.