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[English Version] I. Religionsgeschichtlich Es gehört zur conditio humana, die Alltagssituationen meistern zu müssen und in ihren Bruchstellen zu bestehen. Dazu benötigen die Mitglieder jeder Gesellschaft griffige Verhaltenskodizes, um in den vielfältigen Krisen überleben zu können. Leben und Sterben, Zeit und Ewigkeit, Sinn und Unsinn markieren solche Bruchstellen sowohl im Einzelschicksal wie im Weltgeschehen. Die Antworten, welche von Kulturen und Rel. auf diese Fragen gegeben werden, dokumentieren die Sehnsucht nach U. 1.  Modelle Systematisierend lassen sich in…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Philosophy of Religion – III. Christianity – IV. Taoism I. Religious Studies It is inherent in the conditio humana that we are forced to master everyday situations and withstand critical moments. To do so, members of every society need handy codes of conduct to survive the manifold crises. Life and death, time and eternity, meaning and meaninglessness mark such critical moments in both individual lives and the course of the world. The responses of cultures and religions to these questions document our yearning for immortality. 1. Models We …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies 1. General. The words for time denote in different languages, according to their etymological derivation and symbolic semantic field, different ways of dividing natural and cultural forms of progression and sequences of events into parts separated and distinguished from one another. The German word for time, Zeit, comes from Old High German zīt; “divide (up)”, from the root *dāi, “divide,” and implies the general dividing function of ideas of time, as factors in ordering experience of the world. Different ideas of time …

[German Version] I. Antiquity 1. Greek. The expression ῥητορικὴ τέχνη/ rhētorikḗ téchnē was coined by the Sophistic school, which created the theoretical foundation for a form of communication thought of – especially in the Greek world – as an agon: the appearance of one or more communicators before the public, engaging in a linguistic contest. The cultural background of such performance events ¶ (Speech act) was the literary agon and the forensic contest, already mentioned by Homer ( Il. 18.497–508). It was the particular achievement of the Greek Enlightenment of the 5th…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies The sun is omnipresent; in the phenomenal world, it marks and accentuates the course of our chronological and spatial lifeworld. The range of associated structures, interpretations, and ambivalences (light and dark, life-giving and life-consuming) makes it only natural that the sun should acquire religious symbolisms and orientations in many ways and in many areas: (1) orientation in time (annual calendrical cycle, identification of sacral seasons and hours of th…

[English Version] I. Religionswissenschaftlich, religionsgeschichtlich 1.  PhänomenologischDie christl.-abendländischen Konnotationen des durch die Forschung von außen an religionsgesch. Befunde herangetragenen Seelenbegriffs sind am weitesten auszuschließen, wenn man S. als Prinzip wahrnehmbarer oder kulturell für wahrnehmbar gehaltener Lebensäußerungen versteht, die allerdings selten unter einem gemeinsamen Oberbegriff zusammengefaßt werden. Deshalb ist es sinnvoll, von einer Vielzahl von S. zu spr…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies 1. Phenomenology Western, Christian connotations of the concept of the soul, imposed on the religio-historical evidence by outside studies, must be generally excluded if the soul is understood as the principle of manifestations of life that are perceptible (or culturally considered to be perceptible), although they are rarely categorized under a common umbrella term. It is therefore reasonable to speak of a multiplicity of souls – for example four among the Ob-Ugrians (Hasenfratz, Einführung, 38–41), five among the Proto-Germanic peoples ( ib…