Chris Doss wrote:
> A guy called Martin Heidegger wrote a lot about this.
So did guys called Husserl and Whitehead.
In their version of phenomenology, however, it's claimed that experience as it is in itself - what Whitehead calls "direct intuitive observation" - can provide rational grounds for belief in a number of "religious" ideas (e.g. in Whitehead's case, for belief in an entity Whitehead calls "god"). See, for instance, Whitehead's Religion in the Making.
As Whitehead also points out, however, adherents of "science" in its orthodox form are almost invariably "religious" in the bad sense, i.e. dogmatically impervious to rational critique of their ontological beliefs. Thus there is debate about the relative importance of environment and genes in the determination of human thought, feeling and behaviour, but no debate about the idea of "determinism" embodied in the scientific materialist ontology dominant in orthodox science including orthodox biology. This idea excludes any role for self-determination, and, hence, for the Hegel/Marx idea of "human being" as a being potentially able to be self-determined in the senses of a "will proper" and a "universal will."
Ted