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)

Introduction. The article is focused on analyzing the aesthetic aspect of A. Kojève’s philosophy, the ability of his philosophy, from an aesthetic point of view, to clarify a number of key problems of the modern political and cultural environment. The purpose of the study is to determine the epistemological attitude of A. Kojève’s philosophy able to clarify the way in which his philosophy problematizes the current cultural and political reality. Methods. Hermeneutics, comparative analysis and deconstruction are used as research methods. (...) Comparative analysis allows us to demarcate A. Kojève’s own line of reasoning, in the context of aesthetic and epistemological theories, as well as Hegelian themes themselves. Hermeneutics is the central method in the work, since the philosophy of A. Kojeve requires interpretation as an aesthetic theory. Deconstruction, formalized to the status of a method according to P. de Man, allows us to detect inconsistencies, the principle of mutual problematization of Kojeve’s philosophy and the current political and epistemological agenda. Scientific novelty of the research. The standard way of interpreting the work of A. Kojève is to evaluate him as an interpreter of G. Hegel. The author analyzes some meaning of A. Kojève’s philosophy, separate from G. Hegel’s explanation of the text. The novelty lies not only in the fact that A. Kojève’s philosophy is defined as theorizing that goes beyond technical hermeneutics (clear presentation), but also as a specific representation of such theorizing as epistemological aesthetic theory. The latter is a rather rare interpretation of the philosophy of A. Kojeve. This allows us to expand the traditional assumption that post-Hegelian epistemesthetics is the property of an extremely limited number of authors (for example, B. Croce). Moreover, such an interpretation of A. Kojève’s theories is a new element in the emerging trend of considering political issues within the framework of epistemological aesthetics. Results. The specific mode of interpreting G. Hegel, which is carried out by A. Kojève, turns the philosophy of the former into a unique aesthetic project. In this project, the category of aesthetic experience comes to the foreground, indicating the empty, formal nature of any discourse. In this regard, any claim to knowledge of reality, to a correct idea of the subject is replaced by the idea of creating the subject of discourse. Consistent treatment of this idea is symptomatic of the philosophy of A. Kojève. This philosophy is a reflection of those historical changes that gave rise to the culture of “aesthetic rationality”: empty and formal. In A. Kojève’s philosophy, one can see how such a culture of the End of History is, contrary to Hegelian ideas, not the era of the struggle decline, but the era of its strange transformation, a symptom of increasing political violence. Conclusions. A. Kojève’s philosophy is considered not as a utopian political project, but as a problematization of the modern cultural and political sphere. The latter is understood as an indication of the inconsistency of ontological discourses of Truth, the discovery in the very essence of discursive practices of an empty, formal principle, and therefore primarily of interest to aesthetics. The modern era of the End of History and the end of the era of persuasive speech gives an idea of the main political paradox (at least for the philosophy of A. Kojève, and at most for the modern political environment). The era of disappointment in discourse should become an era of refusal to fight for discourses, but it becomes an era of maximizing violence, since it is in a situation of disappointment that discourses can only be supported by force. We move from unconvincing speech to convincing violence, but it is possible to understand the origins and specifics of this transition only by considering A. Kojève’s philosophy in the light of such a discipline as aesthetics. (shrink)

Two philosophical traditions with much in common, (classical) pragmatism and (Heidegger's) hermeneutic philosophy, are here\ncompared with respect to their approach to the philosophy of science. Both emphasize action as a mode of interpreting experience.\nBoth have developed important categories – inquiry, meaning, theory, praxis, coping, historicity, life-world – and each has\noffered an alternative to the more traditional philosophies of science stemming from Descartes, Hume, and Comte. Pragmatism's\nabduction works with the dual perspectives of theory (as explanation) and praxis (as culture). The (...) hermeneutical circle depends\nin addition on the lifeworld as background source of ontological meaning and resource for strategies of inquiry. Thus a hermeneutical\nphilosophy of research involves three components: lifeworld (as ontological and strategic), theory (as explanatory), and praxis\n(as constitutive of culture). (shrink)

The chapter approaches the hermeneutic concept of experience introduced by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) from the perspective of the conceptual history of experience in the Western philosophical tradition. Through an overview of the concept and the epistemological function of experience (empeiria, experientia, Erfahrung) in Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Hegel, it is shown that the tradition has considered experience first and foremost in methodological terms, that is, as a pathway towards a form of scientific (...) knowledge that is itself increasingly immune to experience. Science strives “beyond” experience because of the limitations inherent in the fundamentally contingent, singular, and negative character of experience: experience comes to us through unpredictable chance encounters and in singular situations and negates, tests, or “imperils” previous knowledge, thereby transforming it. By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics rethinks experience precisely in terms of these limitations. In the hermeneutic approach articulated by Gadamer and Claude Romano, experience is an encounter with the irreducible finitude and historical situatedness of one’s understanding and conceptual framework, an encounter with an otherness that puts our preunderstanding to test and requires us to revise it. Hermeneutic experience is thus a singular event that irreparably transforms us. (shrink)

In this chapter I analyze the concept of self-consciousness in order to uncover its conceptual structure. The conclusions of this analysis describe some of the necessary categories of conscious experience. The concept of the self, the concept of consciousness, the concept of objectivity, the temporal distinctions between past, present, and future, and finally the idea of natural regularities, are found to be necessary categories for conscious experience, and hence describe the fundamental cognitive structure of self-conscious beings.

ABSTRACT The article argues that theological hermeneutics by its own standards requires a theological understanding of the act of human listening. Based upon a phenomenological approach to this act, and drawing especially on Husserl and Ihde, an analysis of auditory intentionality is carried out. The categories of voice and auditory horizon are then applied to the field of theology. Using further insights by Ricoeur, Barth and Kierkegaard, it is argued that the auditory dimension in theology can be reconstructed as the (...) experience both of listening to Scripture as well as listening with Scripture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anthony Paul Kerby THE ADEQUACY OF SELF-NARRATION: A HERMENEUTICAL APPROACH An important question that arises from the increasing contemporary emphasis on the self as a narrative construct concerns the adequacy or truthfulness of the narrative accounts we give ofourselves. What, for example, stops our self-narrations and self-characterizations from becoming, in many cases, mere flights of fancy or fictions? If, on a fairly radical view, the self is taken (...) to be a product of narrative emplotment, then clearly the above question cannot be answered by a simple appeal to what the narrative is supposed to represent or copyas though the selfwere first given to us external or prior to the narrative. It is not immediately clear, however, just what a narrative account of the human subject could be adequate to, and, if we were to grant some prenarrative status to the human subject, it is also not clear whether the imposition of narrative structures falsifies the "truth" of this latter subject. What we shall examine, then, is precisely this important question of adequacy and various problems that surround it. To bring these problems into focus and offer some solutions, we shall consider both self-narration and the writing of history. These solutions will have a decidedly hermeneutical flavor, and for one principal reason: hermeneutics, especially as represented by Gadamer and Ricoeur, is particularly suited to addressing questions of self-expression while avoiding traditional metaphysical presuppositions about the human subject. Let us begin with a few words on hermeneutics. To offer a hermeneutics of something will presumably commit one to certain philosophical and methodological presuppositions. To see what these presuppositions are we might briefly compare hermeneutics to two of its close neighbors: phenomenology and semiotics. I believe 232 Anthony Paul Kerby233 diät these three positions are all of value and that their central insights must be integrated. Contemporary hermeneutics can be viewed as usefully fulfilling this latter task. On the one hand, a hermeneutic philosophy can accept the phenomenological starting point of immediacy to phenomena. However, it does not delude itself into thinking that there is a privileged mode of access to phenomena that would disconnect the categories of our particular historical and linguistic heritage. On the other hand, while recognizing that our understanding is mediated by language and semiotic systems generally—the signifying networks of exchange and communication—hermeneutics need notlose contactwith the life-experiences of the subjects within this semiotic realm. That is, we not only come to understand the sign systems operative in our world, but also, to some degree, ourselves as we act in and through them. As Ricoeur often stresses, semiotics (and structuralism) have still to take the final step of accounting for the experiencing subjects presupposed by any structural social system. Semiotics would, at its extreme point, remain arbitrary with respect to phenomenological experience, just as phenomenology would remain silent if it were consistendy to avoid the conceptual and cultural biases of our languages. Thus, while presupposing individual human experience (and worldliness ), hermeneutics can still accept that such experience only achieves expression and explicit understandingin the semiotic realm, and further that this expression is not the duplication of a fully formed but preexpressed understanding, for understanding is only first grasped at the level of expression. As Gadamer has written: "Being that can be understood is language," but this is not to deny the existence of some matter at hand, a hermeneutic Sache selbst, that thereby comes to language ; in our case the human subject itself. Hermeneutics is essentially a reflexive philosophy, but one which rejects the absolute starting point of the Cartesian subject. The subject's self-understanding is an interpretive process, where we must recognize interpretation as an integral part of the subject's very being. Charles Taylor sums up this hermeneutic situation by saying that man "cannot be understood simply as an object among objects, for his life incorporates an interpretation, an expression of which cannot exist unexpressed, because the self that is to be interpreted is essentially that of a being who self-interprets." ' This position, which implies a rejection of both subjectivism and die metaphysics of presence, problematizes self-understanding by viewing the self as mediated by its... (shrink)

In the worlds of philosophy, linguistics, and communications theory, a view has developed which understands conscious experience as experience which is 'reflected' back upon itself through language. This indicates that the consciousness we experience is possible only because we have culturally invented language and subsequently evolved to accommodate it. This accords with the conclusions of Daniel Dennett (1991), but the 'hermeneutic objection' would go further and deny that the objective sciences themselves have escaped the hermeneutic circle. -/- (...) The consciousness we humans experience is developed only within the context of crossing the 'symbolic threshold' (Percy 1975; Deacon 1997) and one of the earliest and most important symbols we acquire is that of the self, or 'the subject of experience'. It is only when we achieve self-awareness that the world, as such, comes to exist for us as an object (which contains categories and sub-categories of objects). Any consciousness imputed to prelinguistic stages of development is based on projection and guesswork, since we can know nothing directly of it. It can be said that any experience which does not separate an inner subject from an outer world is probably a continuum of sensation in which environmental stimulus and instinctive response are experienced as a unity; it may be 'lived experience' but it is experience 'lived' non-consciously. -/- Speech requires assertion and by learning to speak we find ourselves asserting, in essence, our selves into the world. The narrative form of language allows us to develop life stories, self-knowledge, and, most important, narrative memory coincident with narrative time. All this is made possible with the intersubjective 'net' of language which allows us to know ourselves by first identifying with the viewpoint of others; and, later, such allows us to identify with other minds as we anticipate their reception our communication. These three, assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity are the essence of what language is and are the keystones that make culture possible outside of nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hermeneutics, Neuroscience and PsychiatryMichael T. H. Wong, MBBS, MD, MA, MDiv, PhD, FRCPsych, FRANZCP, FHKAM (bio)Hermeneutic practice in mental health has been a theme in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology (PPP) since its very beginnings. In this essay I argue that hermeneutics, the theory and practice of interpretation, promotes therapeutic interaction between mental health professionals, patients and their family.Why does this patient present in such a way at this particular (...) point in time? The distressing symptoms are there. The changes in behavior are obvious. Impairments of functions are hurting. A mental illness clearly runs in the family. There were early losses of loved ones, physical abuse at home, bullying by peers and self-medication with drugs and alcohol. Three in four adults with a mental illness first experienced that before they turned 24. The brain goes through major reorganization during adolescence and early adulthood. If synaptic pruning went wrong, psychoses emerged. When stresses activated the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis the elevated cortisol level impacted the size and function of the hippocampus and amygdala in the genetically vulnerable; anxiety, depression, bipolar, and personality disorders developed. The patient needs a voice/language to describe all these experiences and events and the psychiatrist needs a discourse to make sense of them.Eisenberg laments the swings between "brainlessness" and "mindlessness" in psychiatry. Engel argues for a "biopsychosocial" discourse. The major challenge for psychiatry is how to organize clinical information of different nature (categories, dimensions, narratives; i.e., objective vs. subjective, personal vs. interpersonal) into a coherent and comprehensible account for us all. Mental illnesses are not only neuropsychiatric spectrum disorders but also dysfunctions of social relationship and environmental/ecological adaptation. Psychiatry as a clinical neuroscience per se lacks the semantics to address the rich interactions between the physical, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual in the illness experience of our patients. Explanation in the diagnostic formulation (objective scientific discourse on cause and effect) and understanding in the patient narrative (subjective ordinary everyday discourse on significance and meaning) are irreducible to each other (Wong, 2018). They instead interact with one another to achieve an integrative formulation, not through merging different discourses into a single assertion/monologue but via the dialectic/dialogue of "explaining more in order to understand better," as Ricoeur puts it, and between "the whole and the parts," as Schleiermacher highlights.This "therapeutic hermeneutic circle" of "explanation vs understanding" and "the whole vs the parts" includes symptoms behavior function and life events. It correlates between bio-psychosociocultural-spiritual dimensions/perspectives and does not reduce them to any particular/single [End Page 13] stance. The whole integrates the parts and the parts enrich the whole. It explains but does not explain away. It understands through an articulation of meaning and significance. This discourse is a multilayered (bio-psycho-social-cultural-spiritual) personal narrative that formulates diagnosis and care in a correlative (linking different voices/discourses) and non-reductive (no particular voice/discourse is prejudiced against) manner that is comprehensible to us all (Wong, 2021).PPP will be an excellent forum for discussing clinical hermeneutics in the future. In this digital era of social media and virtual reality, hermeneutics has the never-ending task to tackle the unprecedented challenges to meaning illness and health posed by polarizing discourses.Michael T. H. Wong Michael T.H. Wong, MBBS, MD, MA, MDiv, PhD, FRCPsych, FRANZCP, FHKAM, is Hon Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, School of Clinical Medicine, LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, HKSAR, China. Michael is Chair, Section of Philosophy & Humanities in Psychiatry, World Psychiatric Association. He is an Organizational Partner & International Lead with The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care, St Catherine's College Oxford. He is Advisor to the Chinese Health Foundation of Australia.ReferencesWong M. T. H. (2018). Ricoeur and the third discourse of the person: From philosophy and neuroscience to psychiatry and theology. London: Lexington Books. Google ScholarWong, M. T. H. (2021). Values, meanings, hermeneutics and mental health. In Stoyanov, D., Fulford, K. M. W. F., Stanghellini, G., Van Staden, W., & Wong, M. TH. (Eds.), International perspectives in values-based mental health practice: Case studies and commentaries (pp. 341–349... (shrink)

Narrative analysis is well established as a means of examining the subjective experience of those who suffer chronic illness and cancer. In a study of perceptions of the outcomes of treatment of cancer of the colon, we have been struck by the consistency with which patients record three particular observations of their subjective experience: the immediate impact of the cancer diagnosis and a persisting identification as a cancer patient, regardless of the time since treatment and of the presence (...) or absence of persistent or recurrent disease; a state of variable alienation from social familiars, expressed as an inability to communicate the nature of the experience of the illness, its diagnosis and treatment; and a persistent sense of boundedness, an awareness of limits to space, empowerment and available time. These subjectivities were experienced in varying degree by all patients in our study. Individual responses to these experiences were complex and variable. The experiences are best understood under the rubric of a category we call “liminality”. We believe that all cancer patients enter and experience liminality as a process which begins with the first manifestations of their malignancy. An initial acute phase of liminality is marked by disorientation, a sense of loss and of loss of control, and a sense of uncertainty. An adaptive, enduring phase of suspended liminality supervenes, in which each patient constructs and reconstructs meaning for their experience by means of narrative. This phase persists, probably for the rest of the cancer patient’s life. The experience of liminality is firmly grounded in the changing and experiencing body that houses both the disease and the self. Insights into the nature of the experience can be gained from the Existentialist philosophers and from the history of attitudes to death. Understanding liminality helps us to understand what it is that patients with cancer seek from the system to which they turn for help. Its explication should therefore be important for those who provide health care, those who educate health care workers and those concerned to study and use outcomes as administrative and policy making instruments. (shrink)

Many commonly accepted models for understanding disability use a vertical method in which disability is defined as a category into which people are slotted based on whether or not they fit its definitional criteria. This method, and the models of disability developed in accordance with it, inevitably homogenizes the experiences of disabled people to preserve the integrity of the definition of disability that a given model provides. A hermeneutic investigation and critique of commonly accepted models for understanding disability will (...) provide an epistemological tool that makes it possible both to critique and to augment contemporary models of disability. (shrink)

The question standing in the backgrounds of this paper is what kind of hermeneutics can emerge on basis of philosophy of life. To answer it, the theories of German philosophers Georg Misch and Josef Koenig have been analyzed. The first developed hermeneutical logics, which is based on identification the notions ‘life’ and ‘articulation’ ). Three aspects –life as logical category, life as hermeneutical category, and the discoursive forms of self-representation of life- extracted from Misch’s theory seem (...) to be relevant for further development of hermeneutics. Koenig carries forward this research program, but focuses on the linguistic structures of human perception experience and drafts a kind of analytical hermeneutics. The remarkable part of both conceptions is that they pose it logical heterogenity of theoretical and practical discourses. These differences are relevant for rethinking of such epistemological phenomenon, such as ‘meaning’, ‘concept’, ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. According to these positions, hermeneutics can be a homogenous theory of interpretation or understanding, but on the contrary the different logical areas of hermeneutics must be constituted. Thus, hermeneutics can be interpreted as an alternative to the traditional, i.e., epistemological approach, to the theory of knowledge, on the one hand, and to analytical philosophy of language on the other. (shrink)

In his pioneering sociological theory, which makes phenomenological concepts fruitful for the social sciences, Alfred Schütz has laid foundations for a characterization of an manifold of distinct domains of experience. My aim here is to further develop this pluralist theory of experience by buttressing and extending the elements of diversity that it includes, and by eliminating or minimizing lingering imbalances among the domains of experience. After a critical discussion of the criterion-catalogue Schütz develops for the purpose of (...) characterizing different cognitive styles, I move on to examine its application to one special style, the lifeworld. I appeal, on the one hand, to Husserl's characterization of the lifeworld as a world of perception, and on the other hand to the layer-model of the lifeworld developed by Schütz and Thomas Luckmann. A consequence of this approach is that the lifeworld appears as a socially definable context that is detached from other experiences but on an equal footing with them with respect to their claim of validity. The term "lifeworld" does not denote a category that encompasses culture or nature but refers to a delimited action-space. Finally, I draw upon Schütz' s criterion-catalogue to characterize two domains of experience outside of the lifeworld, which play a central role for the process of differentiation of experience in modernity and for the phenomenological analysis of types of experience: experimental science and subjectivity. (shrink)

The idea for this article was developed in ecumenical discussion regarding the worrisome developments in some neo-Pentecostal ministries where stories of snake-eating, petrol-drinking, false prophecies and so on were being alleged. A burning question during the discussion was: what is it with the hermeneutic of experience that makes it possible for such stories to arise? Furthermore, how can this situation be remedied? The researchers set to answer this question by conducting a literature study on the subject of hermeneutics of (...) African Indigenous Churches, neo-Pentecostalism and Mission Pentecostalism. The inclusion of AICs and Mission Pentecostalism follows the scholarly consensus led by Allan Anderson in which all three together constitute African Pentecostalism. This article offers a critical reflection on the corrosive role of fundamentalist-inspired exclusivism, judgementalism and pride, which feed ignorance of the basic oneness of African Pentecostal Christianity. It concludes that abuse abounds in the divisions and maintenance of the above-mentioned fundamentalist attitudes and raises the necessity of creating awareness of belonging to one community. This community’s historical experience of the activity of the Spirit and Scripture may serve as critical input into its hermeneutic, hopefully lessening if not eradicating abuse. (shrink)

This book charts and challenges the bruising impact of post-Saussurean thought on the categories of experience and self-presence. It attempts a reappropriation of the category of lived experience in dialogue with poststructuralist thinking. Following the insight that mediated subjectivity need not mean alienated selfhood, Meredith forwards a postmetaphysical model of the experiential based on the interpenetration of poststructuralist thinking and hermeneutic phenomenology. Since poststructuralist approaches in feminist theory have often placed women's lived experiences "under erasure," Meredith uses (...) this hermeneutic/deconstructive model to attempt a rehabilitation of the singular "flesh and blood" female existent. (shrink)

A phenomenological hermeneutic study of the lifeworld of critical care nursing was undertaken, from which emerged the concept of ‘focusing’. Focusing is defined as empathizing concern for the critically ill person and his/her family amid the high technology of the intensive care unit. When nurses focus on the patient and the patient's family they are able to empathize with die personal dimensions of caring. The study used a phenomenological hermeneutic approach to describe die nature of the lived experience of (...) clinical nursing practice in a high technology environment. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show how philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin related to the hermeneutical tradition — and tried to move beyond it by ‘redeeming’ human experience, while avoiding the pitfalls of the philosophy of ‘authenticity’. Though convinced that questions relating to historicity were central to any understanding of modern human experience, Benjamin explicitly rejected the Heideggerian alternative, and chose a path closer to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s. He attempted to combine theological interpretation with dialectical materialism, (...) always grounding hermeneutics in the concrete manifestations of social life, inaugurating a method which I suggest could be called ‘hermeneutical materialism’. At stake was a politically motivated defence of the ‘mimetic faculty’ — understood as (re)interpretation — in the modern, technologically organized world. (shrink)

This book is a systematic study of religious morality in the works of John Henry Newman (1801-1890). The work considers Newman's widely discussed views on conscience and assent, analyzing his understanding of moral law and its relation to the development of moral doctrine in Church tradition. By integrating Newman's religious epistemology and theological method, the author explores the hermeneutics of the imagination in moral decision-making: the imagination enables us to interpret complex reality in a practical manner, to relate belief with (...) action. The analysis bridges philosophical and religious discourse, discussing three related categories. The first deals with Newman's commitment to truth and holiness whereby he connects the realm of doctrine with the realm of salvation. The second category considers theoretical foundations of religious morality, and the third category explores Newman's hermeneutics of the imagination to clarify his view of moral law, moral conscience, and Church tradition as practical foundations of religious morality. The author explains how secular reason in moral discernment can elicit religious significance. As a result, Church tradition should develop doctrine and foster holiness by being receptive to emerging experiences and cultural change. John Henry Newman was a highly controversial figure and his insightful writings continue to challenge and influence scholarship today. This book is a significant contribution to that scholarship and the analysis and literature comprise a detailed research guide for graduates and scholars. (shrink)

Much of the contemporary discussion of religion seems to do away with the very possibility of revelation. In this article, I use Lacoste’s phenomenology of la parole to rethink a theology of revelation in terms of God’s personal self-giving in experience. After examining Lacoste’s views of the relationship between philosophy and theology, his liturgical reduction and what this means for an understanding of experience and knowledge, and his thought of la parole more broadly, I give critical consideration to (...) how he thinks the possibility of God’s address to humanity. Lacoste maintains that God’s presence in experience may be known through affection, and, indeed, that the word may so move us that we are able to recognise that presence. He uses the notion of self-evidence rather than the usual phenomenological category of evidence to evince the reasonableness of this response. I argue that while Lacoste accords due deference to a traditional understanding of revelation as the repetition or unfolding of a word addressed to us in the past, his thought also allows us to think revelation as a contemporary event, the hermeneutics of which allow us to know God in ways that are new. (shrink)

This paper considers a principal concept of metaphysics – the category of substance – as it figures in Kant’s critical program of establishing metaphysics as a science. Like Leibniz, Kant identifies metaphysical concepts through logical reflection on the form of cognitive activity. He thus begins with general logic’s account of categorical judgment as an act of subordinating predicate to subject. This categorical form is then considered in transcendental logic with reference to the possibility of its real use. Transcendental reflection (...) reveals that the categorical form, in its potential for such use, constitutes the category of substance and accident, representing a first real subject and a determination of its existence. But to qualify for objective, scientific employment, metaphysics’ concepts must admit of real definitions, which show their objects to be possible, and such possibility, pace Leibniz, can be established only in relation to possible experience. Thus, relying on his doctrine of the schematism, Kant shows the category to figure constitutively in experience, as the ground of the first law of nature, that in all change substance persists. (shrink)

Abe Masao 阿部正雄 is accepted by many as a member of the Kyoto School of philosophy, known primarily for its role in drawing together distinct traditions of Western and Asian thought.1 Abe was a key figure in this respect, dedicating much of his career to dialogue with Western philosophers and theologians.2 Through his many essays, translations, lectures, and conversations, Abe brought Zen Buddhism to audiences in Europe and the United States. In particular, he introduced his own interpretation of the philosophy (...) of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and his followers, to Western audiences. Through his work in Japanese, especially his final essays, Abe also developed a more personal perspective and... (shrink)

Written in broad strokes, this paper attempts to draw form Krishnamurti’s life and teachings, a hermeneutics of the human soul’s quest-journey towards transcendent wholeness. It begins with an attempt to frame K’s “process” (the name given to the painful ordeals in his youth that many believe were the catalyst responsible for his metamorphosis) through a variety of disciplines and cultural perspectives, some of which underscore the impasse of scientific objectivity and the limits of phenomenalist categories in general. It then explores (...) the procedures and conceits of present technologies of self-transformation via pseudomeditative body work and suggests that this subject can only be confirmed by an experience so intimately and subversively (to its own object) subjective that it risks undermining its own legitimacy in the face of our body-phobic Cartesian cultural ethos that holds sacrosanct the mind-body split. -/- It then explores the deeper origins and history of this problem from the pre-Socratics to the misconceptions of modern mathematics about the proper place of metaphor and paradox and underscores how present day false consciousness fails to discriminate between a “noumenal” world and its conditioned “phenomenal” counterfeit copy. It ends with a brief meditation on K’s process. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle AgesMichael CalabreseRhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, by Rita Copeland; xiv & 295 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, $64.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.In this deeply learned book, Rita Copeland studies the history of rhetoric and grammar and their shifting roles in the history of translation, commentary, and interpretation from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages. Copeland examines the ideological (...) nexus of history, authority, and power in which commentary and vernacular translation function. “Vernacular writing,” she says, can “authorize itself by taking over the function of academic discourse” (p. 8). Her book then traces the history of this “authorization” and this “dis-placement” of Latin sources by the increasingly academically privileged vernacular. All in all, Copeland tells the story of how medieval literary culture articulated its translatio studii by confronting and preserving its Classical inheritance and also developing a role for the vernacular as an active, creative agent in the production of authoritative works. [End Page 413]Ultimately “rhetoric” is the star of Copeland’s book, and in essence she is telling its Roman and medieval life stories. By “rhetoric” we are to understand critical academic language that points toward ethics and practical action. Throughout the Middle Ages every modification or appropriation of critical tools expands the role of commentary and adds new forms of interpretive invention to the translation process. As Copeland puts it, “The medieval practice of translation as a form of appropriation and substitution will be conditioned, as in Roman contexts, by rhetorical theories of invention” (p. 36).The hermeneutical costar is grammar, for as part of the complex appropriation of classical practice, medieval readers recoup the “debased” Roman category of grammar, so that by the time of Martianus Capella it can “claim for itself the whole compass of literary activity” (p. 56). As grammar expands its power, so does rhetoric, a civic Roman art which gets “revalued in terms of service to theology” (p. 59). Medieval commentary now “assumes the character of rhetorical performance” (p. 86) and takes on a “primary productive character,” as it “continually refashions the [studied] text for changing conditions of understanding” (p. 64). What is emerging from all these developments is a medieval translation theory—and practice—which is informed by both academic and practical, ethical goals, that is, a hermeneutics forged by the link of grammar and rhetoric.The rest of the book studies the shifting status and the evolving role of the vernacular in this medieval hermeneutical drama. Copeland addresses the Ovide moralisé and the French translations of the Consolatio, and then Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Gower’s Confessio Amantis. We witness here how vernacular products take on authority by “inventing themselves” through authoritative discourse. In Gower’s Confessio we see the fusion of hermeneutics and rhetoric; the poem uses academic modes of discourse in the service of ethics or action. We thus see that by the late Middle Ages vernacular literature plays an authoritative role in the medieval translatio studii, as Gower seeks to “open the institution of learning to the widest possible audience and thereby empower it as a persuasive tool, leading to knowledge of the good” (p. 220). Overall, Copeland has told the story of the “leveling” of academic and vernacular discourse, so that the later, while not dispelling or overthrowing the former, can claim access to its traditional authority.Copeland’s prose is Latinate, at times pedantic and, at times, just plain Latin; reading the book can be a wearing experience. But it is all part of a history she knows in remarkable detail, a history that lies behind many assumptions we have about medieval ethical poetics. To have presented this history is a major scholarly feat. Copeland allows us to see medieval authors as both products and producers of methods of appropriation, imitation, conquest, and preservation—all strategies for “translating” the past and creating a present that can leave its intellectual mark on the future. One might now want to employ Copeland’s history of classical and medieval hermeneutics as a tool for [End Page 414] examining our own, contemporary academic rhetorics and for analyzing the “state of... (shrink)

Agamben’s self-professed epigonism underwrites his entire project, serving as an even more fundamental methodological concept than the signature, paradigm, and archeology. In Infancy and History, Agamben maintains that transcendental experience is no longer a viable source of philosophical insight; philosophers go astray referring their thinking back to an authentic yet esoteric experience that, itself unspeakable, grounds positive philosophical assertions. Neither mysterious nor ineffable, the experience founding philosophy is the completely patent, non-latent, experience of language’s pure exteriority. (...) Rather than “deconstructing” metaphysics by exposing its hidden contradictions, philosophy must “deconfabulate,” telling fables about philosophy to undo its enchantments, since it is through the fable that the spell of silence, which itself originates in fable, can be broken. This “epigonal” method, which follows after the tradition rather than seeking a new grounding, is itself justified through Agamben’s account, in The End of the Poem, of the Italian, as opposed to Germanic, physiognomy and of a specifically Italian relation to language going back to Dante. To be Italian is to embrace the “deadness” of one’s own language, rejecting the myth of the resurrection of the original potencies of a dead classical language through a living, modern language. (shrink)

This paper presents a philosophical reflection on the city and the space. It proposes a different interpretation of the city, shifting the traditional focus on the historical and time-related aspects to a consideration of the space as a central category of analysis. This perspective seeks to define what a city is and to understand the different dynamics and processes that influence its constitution, development, transformation, or disappearance. In contrast to the traditional approach focused on the city with a temporal (...) perspective, this paper highlights the relevance of the space as a fundamental element of analysis. The central premise lies in presenting an interpretation that highlights how the existence of the city is not only based on the processes of construction but also on the very act of inhabiting. This act, cemented by our relations with space, enables the existence of spatiality. (shrink)

The paper inquires the category of _performance_ in Hannah Arendt. Her concept of the political eludes the tradition-inherited approach and subtracts the praxis from instrumental reason. Arendt revisits the political experiences of ancient Greek cities, where tragedy and assembly, theater and agora, provide the propitious space for action. She avoids the instrumental approach of _homo faber_, conceptualizes action as performance and shows its connaturality with the performing arts, to the detriment of the productive ones. In “What is Freedom?” Arendt (...) understands political freedom as a “worldly fact”, and assesses the Machiavellian _virtù_ as public excellence: as _performance on stage_. (shrink)

Hermeneutical aspect of reference embraces a relation to reality in itsbroadest sense. This aspect of reference explains how some conceptsemployed in scientific theories and historical and fictional text, which areconsidered as “non-existant”, transform our experience of reality. Epistemologicalaspect of reference should not be separated from ontological andhermeneutical aspects.

Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...) perceiving an artwork as belonging to a (correct) category of art requires no art-historical knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, contextualist attempts to incorporate art-historical knowledge via the mechanism of cognitive penetration are incompatible with Walton’s claim that categories of art must be perceptually distinguishable. Here I propose a way of elaborating Walton’s view that avoids this difficulty and reconciles contextualism with aesthetic perception, the view that we perceive aesthetic properties. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A First-Person Analysis Using Third Person-Data as a Generative Method: A Case Study of Surprise in Depression” by Natalie Depraz, Maria Gyemant & Thomas Desmidt. Upshot: The generative method outlined in the target article produces some interesting results, demonstrating the value of cardio-phenomenology. The proposed division of categories reflecting the structure of experience into sub-categories suggests that prior theoretical commitments may have influenced the process of analysis in ways the authors might not have (...) foreseen or intended. This commentary discusses potential areas for future work, proposing that some modifications to the methodology might lessen possibly unforeseen influences on the central process of classification. (shrink)

Captured in narrative textual form through open-ended and tape-recorded interview conversations, visitor experience was interpreted to construct a description of visitors' relationships to place while at the same time providing insights for those who manage the national park. Humans are conceived of as meaning-makers, and outdoor recreation is viewed as emergent experience that can enrich peoples' lives rather than a predictable outcome of processing information encountered in the setting. This process-oriented approach positions subjective well-being and positive experience (...) in the ongoing processes and activities that comprise our life pursuits rather than in particular end states toward which behaviors might be directed as in the case of end state frameworks. Several themes emerged in the interpretation across narratives including a relationship of stewardship/sense of respectful mitigation, socially constructed dimensions of the wilderness concept, which both converged with and deviated from definitions in The Wilderness Act of 1964, humans positioned as both part of wilderness and separate from it, description of a process whereby people form a relationship to protected places, and an awareness among visitors of the overarching management dilemma of how to balance human visitation with protection. Management insights and general implications that emerged from the overall interpretation such as using narrative illustration to enhance visitor education were summarized. It is suggested that the particularities of the setting, in conjunction with the process-oriented creation of meaning via varying levels of physical and social interaction with the setting each play important roles, perhaps at different times, for visitors' relationships to places within the Park. The process of forming long-term relationships to places is highlighted as the common thread running through the interpretation. The value of the national park is seen to lie in these relationships, which are time and context dependent, not necessarily in the attributes of the park, many of which are generic to other protected areas in North America. The dissertation concluded with an evaluation of this interpretation based on these implications and insights and provided direction for further research to learn about the processes involved with forming relationships to protected places. (shrink)

Recent interdisciplinary research in visual stylometry employs digital image analysis algorithms to study the image features and statistics that underwrite our experience of artworks. This research brings psychologists, computer scientists, and art historians together to explore the formal image qualities that define artistic style. We introduce the field of visual stylometry, discuss it's implications for our understanding of both the nature of categories of art and the role artistic style plays in our engagement with artworks. We then discuss the (...) results of our research employing entropy analyses and discrete tonal analyses to classify paintings by school (Impressionism/Hudson River School) and medium/technique (Wyeth/egg-tempura/watercolor). (shrink)

In this study, edited on the basis of a critical review of domestic and foreign literature, as well as authors’ own analyzes, previously presented in several articles (Słodowa-Hełpa 2015; Gorynia 2021 and 2022), mainly in two shorter texts published in popular magazines with a range of Poland (Gory-nia and Słodowa-Hełpa 2022a, 2022b), selected aspects of the concept of the common good from the perspective of the Covid-19 pandemic were presented. The authors’ conviction that in the process of searching for cures (...) to overcome civilization turbulences, the common good cannot be eliminated from the social, political, economic and moral space, was the inspiration to take up this issue. Therefore, the search for answers to the following four questions was considered leading: Will pandemic experiences catalyze a better understanding of the common good? How can they reduce its deficit? To what extent can a return to the concept of the common good, offering real forms of participation and shared responsibility, help in overcoming the painful effects of the present and future threats to civilization? Can respecting the principles of the common good be considered an imperative in the process of overcoming problems of an increasingly global scope? In view of the ambiguity of the category of the common good and the related interpretation difficulties, it was deemed necessary to place the main part of the study in the background of the most general approach to the essence of the analyzed category and its status in philosophical and economic terms. The summary outlines conclusions and postulates concerning the conditions for the functioning of global common goods and the possibility of using them in international cooperation. (shrink)

In his very interesting paper Harry Kunneman argues for an alternative view on voluntary work which not so much stresses the economic aspect but primarily its existentially meaningful aspect. To underpin this, Kunneman makes use of a broad range of hermeneutical, social-philosophical, complexity theoretical, biological and other ideas. This multipolar structure of the article might also prove to be its very weakness, because the rich train of thought remains highly abstract. This could be overcome by using examples and casuistry (...) to elucidate and specify the many distinctions in the article. (shrink)

In the introduction to the third and last volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms of 1929,entitled “Phenomenology of Knowledge,” Ernst Cassirer remarks that the meaning in which he employs the term ‘phenomenology’ is Hegelian rather than according to “the modern usage of the term.”1 What sense can it make, then, to invoke Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology in this context? Yet if, roughly speaking, phenomenology can be characterized as the logosof phenomena,that is, of being insofar as it appears (phainesthai)to a conscious (...) subject, then the sense of phenomenology need not be so different from what Cassirer terms “the modern usage.”2 Phenomenology in this more liberal sense would be an account of how consciousness experiences the world through different forms of experience and in different spaces of meaning. The addition ‘hermeneutic’, moreover, points to a broader methodological scope. (shrink)

There is a section in Samuel Delany’s magnificent autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water, that dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of difference, the history, that is, of the designation of “other,” of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed norm.1 Delany recounts his reaction to his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. He remembers standing on the threshold of a “gym-sized room” dimly lit by blue bulbs. The (...) room was full of people, some standing, the rest an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall to wall. My first response was a kind of heart-thudding astonishment very close to fear. I have written of a space at certain libidinal saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible.2Watching the scene establishes for Delany a “fact that flew in the face” of the prevailing representation of homosexuals in the 1950s as “isolated perverts,” as subjects “gone awry.” The “apprehension of massed bodies” gave him a “sense of political power”:what this experience said was that there was a population—not of individual homosexuals … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex. [M, p. 174] 2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 , p. 173; hereafter abbreviated M. Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author, most recently, of Gender and the Politics of History and is currently at work on a history of feminist claims for political rights in France during the period 1789-1945 as a way of exploring arguments about equality and difference. (shrink)

The Old Testament furnishes its readers with two pictures of Christ’s coming: his coming to earth as a servant in glorious apparel and his coming to earth as a king in glorious apparel. This has brought about bewilderment both to the Jews who expected only the kingly and glorious Christ and the 21st century Christian who are being misled by some preachers and teachers of the Gospel of Christ. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to unearth two forms of (...) Christ’s second coming: a secret coming – as a thief in the night, and public, universal coming, when every eye shall see him. Therefore through lexicosemantics analysis which reveals, its root-words and word-stems and the various possible semantic categories created by the human mind, this paper claims that the secret coming of Christ is what is called the rapture and the public coming is called the παρουσία. It conveys the idea that Christ’s return will be a definite and decisive action on his part. He will come himself, as surely as he came in the incarnation. (shrink)

Hermeneutical aspect of reference embraces a relation to reality in its broadest sense. This aspect of reference explains how some concepts employed in scientific theories and historical and fictional text, which are considered as “non-existant”, transform our experience of reality. Epistemological aspect of reference should not be separated from ontological and hermeneutical aspects.