This article explains how an educator’s haunting experience with the historical portrait, Sick Girl (Krogh, 1881), launched an inquiry about the Norwegian artist’s young sister Nana, who died from tuberculosis in 1868 (Hansen, 2014). The hermeneutic experience opened a portal into the past and through interpreting the work of art with preschool children, a picture emerged of childhood in Scandinavia during the 19th century. Derrida’s notion of “hauntology” (1993) and Gadamer’s (2004) ideas about the experience of play in interpreting the (...) work of art, created a framework upon which to build an understanding of Nana’s ghostly visitations and messages. If traces of history can be reconstructed through visual works and artifacts what are the implications for teaching history to young children? The pedagogical strategies used by the educator to uncover the past and enliven teaching and learning point to the relevance of visual literacy and historical portraiture in early childhood education. (shrink)

According to Gadamer, engaging with a work of art arrests our time and attention, suspends our will, and compels our participation in its unfolding. Time in prison is also arrested time, when our will is suspended and we are compelled to submit to another’s authority. Time inside is often described as an endless present, without meaningful relation to the past or future. The experience of tarrying with art, on the other hand, offers a moment of absolute presentness. This paper explores (...) how these two temporalities differ and overlap in the context of prison theater, namely Shakespeare Behind Bars. Participating in and celebrating the temporality of the work of art allows us to experience the fullness of time and an intensification of being that are absent from a prison temporality characterized as an interminable present. Involvement with art can return us to ourselves and a continuity with our world that imprisonment severs. (shrink)

This is a book review of Dr. Jason Bell’s book, Cracking the Nazi Code, published by Harper Collins Publishers (2023). This review has been shaped by my perceptions of and reflections on current global events. Dr. Bell meticulously compiled 15 years of archival research surrounding the role of Winthrop Pickard Bell, or A12, using historical archives in Canada, Germany, and the UK. His book is invaluable for deepening historical understanding of Canada’s place in the second world war, and to deepen (...) current understanding of the global rise in antisemitism. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to elucidate the hermeneutical experience of the formal eulogy. I hope to demonstrate how the specific activity of the formally delivered eulogy brings together the entire manifold of hermeneutical experience and manifests the whole scope of hermeneutical life: the openness to the Other, tradition and the text, the priority of the question, translation as interpretation, conversation, and the understanding of meaning. Beginning with the Thou that is the text, I will consider the crisis of remembering (...) and interpreting a life and the significance of “the conversation we ourselves are”—even from the other side of death. I will show how the eulogy, as a peculiar and particular hermeneutical moment, reminds us of our shared hermeneutical plight: it is only our finitude and mortality that allows us to belong to and understand one another in a meaningful way. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Hovey was contacted by the lead of a pan-Canadian working group on pediatric brain tumours (PBTWG). While all stakeholders (researchers, clinicians, regulators, patient advocates, ethicists, and industry experts) were highly motivated to address barriers through innovative strategies in collaboration, clinical research, regulation, and business models, advancement has been challenging on multiple levels. Hovey and his team were tasked to facilitate and successfully engage this diverse divisive group of stakeholders to achieve their goals. Inspired by Richard Kearney’s (...) anatheistic wager, the hermeneutic wager acts simultaneously as a team building and research approach, as it serves to gain insight into the perspectives of members of a purposeful community. Through its five conversations, namely imagination, humility, commitment, discernment, and hospitality, the hermeneutic wager elicits responses from the participants that are based on meaningful participation in a relational approach of community co-creation. We individually interviewed the PBTWG facilitators (5). With informed consent, our research team also recorded all 5 of the PBTWG work group meetings (20 participants from 6 stakeholder groups) and break-out room meetings and took notes which consist of rich and extensive narrative data. This data was analyzed alongside the individual PBTWG interviews. The audio and visual data collected via a secure Zoom platform was then transcribed verbatim and analyzed interpretively according to the applied philosophical hermeneutic tradition. Findings centered around six points: “The Work of Stories,” “Changing Landscapes: Community / Communication not Consensus,” “Let the Words Lead You,” “Those Words Matter,” “Metaphors as a Bridge to Understanding,” and “A Road Map to be Inspired By.” Through these findings, we contend that the hermeneutic wager is an invitation for conversation that builds a path to the generation of new and creative understandings that transcend previous ways of knowing. The efficacy of the hermeneutic wager resides in its ability to help build a community of people who work together through and across difference to arrive at a shared understanding and collective outcome. (shrink)

Global pandemics have been increasing in frequency over the past several decades, with infectious diseases constituting the third leading cause of death worldwide. Emma Donoghue, in her novel The Pull of the Stars, tells the story of Nurse Julia Power, working in an Irish maternity ward at the height of the 1918 influenza pandemic. During a period of three days, she is responsible for caring for expectant women with influenza who are quarantined together. In this paper, we draw on themes (...) from this novel, employing Heideggerian and Gadamerian hermeneutic tenets as a central approach for analysis and interpretation. The perinatal experience for those described in the novel, as well as a century of experience for women and nurses, underscore the profile of the perinatal realm, and its implied meaning for Dasein. We describe experiences of maternity care as described in the Canadian Nurse journal (1905 to 2019), which contribute to a context of both evolving and unchanging conditions. We identify themes relating to practices of infection control, privacy, dignity, and holistic care and integrate these ideas in the discussion. The historical and contemporary ethical and practice tensions bear consideration for emerging and future impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic on nurses, families, and perinatal nursing practice. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the experience of re-gaining a measure of well-being. New hearing aids helped me recognize and elaborate anew aspects of the art of interpretation and how it relies on noticing the unnoticed. Gadamer's The Enigma of Health also provides hints as to the troubles with the idea of ecological well-being being unnoticeable. Keywords: Hermeneutics, health, hearing-loss.

Touch is central to clinical practice but can be a “touchy subject” in medical education, simultaneously associated with care, and risk. In the clinical literature, touch is typically categorised as communicative or procedural, with an emphasis on touch as behavioural. Philosophically, touch is also a subject of consideration, yet this literature remains relatively unfamiliar to clinicians. In this essay, I reflect on touch in healthcare and medical education, as explored in my PhD studies, drawing on the work of hermeneutic philosophers, (...) particularly Merleau-Ponty. Interpreting touch, I propose, is inherently hermeneutic, offering many possibilities to deepen our understanding of human interaction and clinical practice. Touch embodies the clinician-patient relationship as a holistic encounter. In high intensity interactions, touch orientates expression of empathy “beyond words". I present the significance of hermeneutics for clinical education, to richly re-imagine, and challenge, the concept of patient-centredness. (shrink)

Impostor phenomenon is faced by most people at some point in their lives. In this editorial a seasoned nurse and novice academic offers her interpretation of imposter phenomenon as experienced at different points in her life. The editorial navigates personal story, related literature, and hermeneutic interpretation on a topic that is relateable to most.

When a living other transforms into a recently-gone other, how does the relationship between two people change? After the sudden and unexpected loss of a lifelong friend, my grief not only focused on the physical loss and the loss of future opportunities together, but also raised questions about what this meant for the state of our relationship and for my own self-understanding. 13th century Japanese philosopher and Sōtō Zen founder Dōgen teaches that death is one with life and experienced every (...) moment as life-and-death. For him, life is a series of ever-changing moments, and it is in this impermanence that one finds learning. Drawing on Gadamerian hermeneutics, I explore what it could mean to ethically relate to a beloved deceased other and how Dōgen’s teachings could help deepen understanding of grief as part of a continually evolving self-in-relation-with-other. (shrink)

This editorial discusses how questions can be overused and serve to distance rather than engage as intended.

As a response to the opioid epidemic in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain in 2016. This document served as a means to reduce risks and address harms of opioid use by recommending that clinicians conduct periodic urine drug testing for patients on chronic opioid therapy. As an unintended result of this recommendation, providers began using unexpected urine drug test results as a reason to dismiss (...) patients from practice, both out of concern for their patients’ wellbeing as well as their own legal risks. Using Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, we argue that this science-based, black-and-white practice does not heed the patient as a whole person. Instead, we recommend a more contextual, patient-centered approach that can help us to better understand and manage patient needs in such contexts. Keywords: Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Opioid Epidemic, Medical Ethics, Chronic Pain. (shrink)

As a response to the opioid epidemic in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain in 2016. This document served as a means to reduce risks and address harms of opioid use by recommending that clinicians conduct periodic urine drug testing for patients on chronic opioid therapy. As an unintended result of this recommendation, providers began using unexpected urine drug test results as a reason to dismiss (...) patients from practice, both out of concern for their patients’ wellbeing as well as their own legal risks. Using Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, we argue that this science-based, black-and-white practice does not heed the patient as a whole person. Instead, we recommend a more contextual, patient-centered approach that can help us to better understand and manage patient needs in such contexts. (shrink)