Inom den moderna hermeneutiska filosofin har begreppet bildning fått en ny och kritisk aktualitet. Det betecknar inte längre bara besittningen av ett kulturarv utan handlar mer om att tänka den process varigenom en individ formas i mötet med det främmande. I bildningsprocessen träder människan ut ur det egna och utsätter sig för det nyas prövning. Därigenom blir också det egna främmandegjort. Genom mötet med det allmänna formas i bildningsprocessen en unik individ och person. Det filosofiska begreppet »person« är intimt länkat till bildningstanken. Begreppen »person« och »bildning« är båda också mötesplatser för filosofi och teologi, eftersom bildning ursprungligen förknippades med att formas till Guds avbild. I åtta nyskrivna bidrag belyser bokens författare hur frågan om bildning och person formulerats hos bland andra Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche och Heidegger, och pekar vidare mot vad ett kritiskt bildningsbegrepp kan betyda i dag.

The limit between the proper and the foreign – how this limit is established, but also crossed and dissolved – has remained a crucial issue in phenomenology. Setting these questions in the context of the phenomenology of religion, this thesis develops an analysis of the relation between transcendence and body understood in terms of a certain limit.

The introductory part is rooted in Edmund Husserl’s discussions of the concept of transcendence, which is shown to have an essential connection to the analysis of inner time-consciousness. Here we encounter a decisive limit to objectifying knowledge, which also comes across in his investigations of the body and its spatiality.

The second part discusses Max Scheler’s critique of Husserl’s excessively objectifying view of knowledge, with a particular focus on Scheler’s understanding of love as a condition of possibility for any knowledge. Scheler is shown to have developed a new concept of transcendence that avoids the pitfalls of objectivism, although in his philosophy of religion he tends to downplay the importance of the body.

The third part undertakes a reading of Edith Stein, who develops ideas similar to Scheler’s, though in a phenomenologically more nuanced fashion. Although her philosophy of religion also bypasses the body, Stein provides a more genuine access to the writings of the mystics, the analysis of which forms the core of the fourth and concluding part. Drawing on the work of the 13^th century Beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg, this concluding chapter develops a phenomenological understanding of religion with an emphasis on transcendence and limit, while also retaining the centrality of our experience of the body. This means: a phenomenology of the limit is investigated, rather than a limit of phenomenology.