To engage with the subtle philosophical implications of the hermeneutical term “lived experience” (Erlebnis) requires a referential differentiation not customary within Anglo‐Saxon empirical thought. Within Erlebnisse, the meaning of the terms understanding and experience become coterminous. In Gadamer's mind, “Erlebnis” is more a psychological category of experience whereas “Erfahrung” denotes a hermeneutical category of experience which explains its recursive nature. Epistemologically speaking, Erlebnisse represent circular units of experience. Erlebnisse understood as units of intense, immediate, personal feeling can only ever convey (...) the psychological predicament of the reading subject. Gadamer's philosophical language probes the limits of conventional usage when he implies that Erfahrungen would be better thought of as distinct occasions in ongoing processes of encounter, negotiation, and engagement. Gadamer's philosophy of Erfahrung exposes the arrogance, presumption, and folly of any claim to economic and political certainty that does not acknowledge or calculate for alternative outcomes. (shrink)

This paper argues that the negativity of hermeneutic experience is revelatory for the following reasons. Hermeneutic failure is not the equivalent of making an erroneous step in a closed circuit of reasoning. Neither is it a refutation. It concerns becoming conscious of an omission, an oversight, an unjustifiable claim to completeness and even the displacement of one interpretation by another more suggestive. The negative dimension of hermeneutic failure is incontrovertibly connected with becoming progressively aware of how, contrary to expectations, a (...) different way of seeing is possible: something comes to light which displaces one’s former judgement. Consciousness of failure is, then, indissociable from an emergent awareness of overlooked and unremarked ways of thinking: “I should have been alert to this” or “I failed to take account of that”. Consciousness of failure is revelatory precisely because something else and something other than my expectation has shown itself to be decisive and in so doing has displaced my former understanding. This is the basis of the claim that the educative and spiritual importance of hermeneutics lies precisely in the practical pursuit of the impossible. It is a key contention of the paper that hermeneutic understanding expands and extends itself as a consequence of its impossible quest for completion. (shrink)

Gadamer's aesthetics demonstrates that the experience of art is grounded in the objectivities of language, history and tradition. By treating words and images as transmittable placeholders for meanings and concepts, hermeneutics gives a persuasive account of how artworks communicate. Davey demonstrates how hermeneutics transforms aesthetic reflection into a poignant attentive practice that is open to the unexpected. This new "poetics" is relevant not only to the understanding of art but also to showing, explaining and defending the cognitive content of the (...) humanities. Hermeneutic aesthetics provides a sound basis for re-thinking humanities disciplines as critical-creative practices able to re-envision the future. (shrink)

This essay considers the foundations of reasonable evaluation in the arts. These we argue concern the relations that constitute our experience of art, and the ontology of the art work itself. The being of the artwork, the experience and the interpretation of it all involve over-lapping modes of part–whole relations. The experience of meaningfulness is not an experience of a singular object or framework of meaning as closed and complete but an experience of relational meaning whereby exposure to one set (...) of meaningful relations transforms another in an on-going and open manner. This suggests that the experience of art itself provides the norms for reasonableness of evaluation. These norms are not rules in the sense of offering a method. They are characteristic of the features of an experience of meaningfulness itself. The essay suggests that the reasonableness of a response to a work can be considered in terms of its appropriacy relative to the context of its own horizon and the horizon surrounding the production of the work; its plausibility, that is, its internal coherence and consistency as a reading; whether the structure of the response is consistent with, supplements, or expands the intelligible content of the work; and whether it gives a sense of the latent possibilities still held within a work and intimates where the movement of a work’s subject-matter might. (shrink)

This essay offers a reflection on the notion of experience considered within the context of framework of relational ontology. The primary advantage of such a consideration is that it escapes the consequences of subject-object accounts of experience, accounts which either laud the cognitive subject as master of the experienced world or exile it to an existence in a world it does not experience as its own. Setting experience within a relational ontology and developing a participatory epistemology around the concept offers (...) an inter-active account of experience as an ontological process and an integrated account of knowing and being. This ends the traditional privileging the human as a cognitive subject and opens the way to thinking of all elements within interactive processes as interpretive agencies. Furthermore, it allows the category of interpretation to be freed from the domain of cognitive subjects and to become a descriptor of ontological interaction in general. (shrink)

Gianni Vattimo is renowned for his doctrine of weak thinking, which argues for a dialogical non‐fundamentalist approach to philosophy, an hermeneutically oriented critique of metaphysics and modernism devoted to unmasking privileged positions of authority and power, a deconstruction of Western philosophy as a pathway to nihilism, and finally a development of hermeneutics as a postmodern defense of Christianity in secularized form. He recognizes in hermeneutic philosophy the double effectiveness of philosophical engagement. Vattimo repositions Nietzsche's nihilism with debates concerning modernity and (...) postmodernity. Nietzsche's analysis of negative and affirmative nihilism sustains Vattimo's signature distinction between strong and weak thought. Vattimo's social and political perspective has clear theological undertones. The outcome of unending individual qualitative transformation is not arrival in a promised land but graceful acceptance of what humans are: hermeneutic creatures whose essence resides in tireless negotiation and transformation. (shrink)

Using the notion of the “in-between as its primary focus, this paper argues that whereas hermeneutic practice has customarily been deployed to better understand the claims of religious texts, once hermeneutic practice itself becomes the object of understanding, then the practice emerges in its own right as a discipline for occasioning meditative thinking. How hermeneutic practice transforms itself into such a vehicle is the subject of this paper.

(2009). Lest We Forget: The Question of Being and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 40, Hermeneutics, pp. 239-254.