As proclaimed by the churches, Jesus of Nazareth is the key to unlocking the depth and breadth of the Christian faith. Jesus’s relations to God and to the Holy Spirit ground his potential relation to every human being. As a consequence of his identity, to be unveiled in theology, Christ illuminates a whole set of questions at the frontier of the Creed: among others the openness of human nature to God, the relationship between the human and the divine, the paradox of the singular and the universal, the unity of matter and life, the challenge of hope among historical ordeals. Christ offers a new understanding, not only of the core issues of the Christian faith but also of the present moment of each believer and of what is truly definitive facing God.

Chapter 10 allows for reflection on the present condition of humanity from an evolutionary perspective. This unique, long-term viewpoint clearly shows how the invention and evolution of technology and its related, falsely created land-linked cultural affinities have finally led the human species to an angst-ridden condition of alienation from Nature.

Compares Cassirer and Heidegger's take on the human being's capacity to orient itself in the world in a meaningful way. Cassirer's theory of the functions of consciousness, the only meat to his functional conception of human subjectivity, is used to describe the diverse, cultural compasses by means of which the 'symbolic animal' navigates the human world (7.1). Heidegger's accounts of 'the they' and of owned ('authentic') existence in turn provide a theory of Dasein's capacity to orient itself within and towards its world (7.2). In view of their shared interest in orientation, I discern an important distinction for both Cassirer and Heidegger between an orienting and an oriented self. With regard to both, they ultimately disagree about the infinite (cultural) or finite (temporal) nature of the human being (7.3).

Offers a thorough reading of all texts in which Cassirer and Heidegger explicitly engaged with each other’s thought. I first sketch the philosophical context of the Davos debate, which constitutes only one moment of a dispute that started in 1923 and continued until the publication of Cassirer’s The Myth of the State in 1946 (1.1). Second, I argue that the public debate in Davos hinges on three interrelated topics: the proper interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, the human condition, and the task of philosophy. Concretely, I show that Cassirer and Heidegger’s diverging readings of Kant are motivated by their different views on the human condition, and that these views are in turn motivated by different conceptions of the task of philosophy, which I consider to be the fundamental breaking point between these two thinkers (1.2). Third, I explain that the same issues of contention also structure, in the same order and with the same increasing intensity, the entire, 23-year-long Cassirer‒Heidegger dispute (1.3).