This paper summarizes the longstanding debate over psychology's fragmentation by illustrating two principal impediments to the fostering of consensus and unity. The paper then discusses the important benefits of past dialogue concerning these issues, suggesting that some progress has been made in dealing with problems of disunity and fragmentation, particularly at the metatheoretical and philosophical levels. This general discussion then forms the backdrop for the following articles, which together form a single argument in favor of a hermeneutic approach to the (...) problem of fragmentation. (shrink)

This paper investigates how Schleiermacher’s universal hermeneutics can be considered as a better alternative to both, German rationalist aesthetics as pioneered by Christian Wolff, and Kant’s transcendental idealism, to the extent of overcoming the problematics of rule-following. A general account of the necessity of a universal hermeneutics and its meaning from historical practices of exegeses is given. This is then followed by the account of rule-following in the tradition of both German rationalist aesthetics and Kant’s transcendental idealism with (...) latter as expounded in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The investigation is comparative and descriptive. The purpose of this study is to discuss the hermeneutic possibilities in research methodologies for human sciences. (shrink)

Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a (...) given discourse is revolutionary just in case it involves a “reconstruction or revision” of the original discourse. Revolutionary approaches are therefore prescriptive. In contrast, a nominalist construal of a given discourse is hermeneutic just in case it is a nominalist construal of a discourse that is put forth as a hypothesis about how the discourse is in fact used; that is, hermeneutic approaches are descriptive. I will adopt Burgess and Rosen’s terminology to describe the two different spirits in which a fictionalist hypothesis in ontology might be advanced. Revolutionary fictionalism would involve admitting that while the problematic discourse does in fact involve literal reference to nonexistent entities, we ought to use the discourse in such a way that the reference is simply within the pretense. The hermeneutic fictionalist, in contrast, reads fictionalism into our actual use of the problematic discourse. According to her, normal use of the problematic discourse involves a pretense. According to the pretense, and only according to the pretense, there exist the objects to which the discourse would commit its users, were no pretense involved. My purpose in this paper is to argue that hermeneutic fictionalism is not a viable strategy in ontology. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I discuss in detail several problematic consequences of any interesting application of hermeneutic fictionalism. Of course, if there is good evidence that hermeneutic fictionalism is correct in some cases, then some of these drastic consequences would have to be accepted.. (shrink)

The interrogation of the problematic character of established traditions has become an increasingly dominant feature of contemporary political and social discourse. Gadamer's discussion of tradition takes on an often-unacknowledged utility in light of these discussions by both observing the subtle ways in which tradition persists even in times of social change while also placing an emphasis on the volitional (hence, risky and contingent) character of engagements with tradition. Gadamer's approach allows for a fidelity to tradition that nonetheless allows for (...) a critical, emancipatory engagement with it, a precursor to the more explicitly political projects of hermeneutic thinkers such as Luigi Pareyson and Gianni Vattimo. This hermeneutic lineage offers our modern age a chance to embrace a new and more authentic relationship with the traditions in which we always-already find ourselves situated by giving us the opportunity to make those traditions speak to the challenges of our tumultuous present. (shrink)

Increasingly, nurses use the philosophy of hermeneutics, especially Heideggerian and Gadamerian hermeneutics, to inform interpretive research. However, application of the work of these philosophers to interpretive nursing research has proved problematic as it fails to recognise, or act upon, obligations inherent in their work. Through a review of hermeneutically informed nursing research, methodological implications regarding the use of hermeneutic philosophy are examined in relation to: (i) the need to address forestructures and pre-understandings; (ii) checking interpretations with research (...) participants; (iii) seeking objectivity, consensus and accuracy in textual interpretation; (iv) evaluating interpretations; and (v) gaining entry into the hermeneutic circle. This review suggests that despite obligations inherent in Heideggerian and Gadamerian hermeneutic philosophy, nurses fail to actualise these obligations in their research. In following Heidegger, nurses need to make the scientific theme secure by working out their forestructures in terms of the phenomenon under investigation. Those following Gadamer need to accept that interpretation seeks to manifest textual meanings rather than individual ones. And, whether following Heidegger or Gadamer, the way to make manifest textual meanings is to engage with the text within the hermeneutic circle by continuing to address forestructures and pre-understandings and by considering their influences upon the research. (shrink)

Against the background of Gadamer's hermeneutics of trust, for which the primary concern of the hermeneutical enterprise is the matter under discussion, the Sache, this essay raises the question of Gadamer's treatment of irony. Gadamer and Gadamerians have criticized the hermeneutics of suspicion—a hermeneutics that always looks under the surface of what is said to see what is hidden. This would seem to make irony a problematic aspect of texts and discourse for a Gadamerian hermeneutics. (...) Nowhere in Gadamer's corpus can we find an extensive discussion of irony, but Gadamer does raise the question of irony in a provocative way in several important junctures. This essay contrasts Gadamer's treatment of irony to that of Leo Strauss and Jacques Derrida. It explores why for Gadamer irony does not call for a hermeneutics of suspicion. (shrink)

The essay reflects on Gadamer’s ambiguous legacy for the philosophy of work. On the one hand, there are times when Gadamer reproduces the problematic distinction between language and labor which short-circuits the very idea of a hermeneutics of work. This is particularly evident in Gadamer’s reflections on technique and craftsmanship in the central sections of Truth and Method, as well as in his descriptions of the “art” of dialogue and the tasks of hermeneutics that separate them emphatically (...) them from the sphere of “making.” I raise some questions about the adequacy of the distinction Gadamer draws between techne and phronesis that structures this account. I argue here that Gadamer’s characterization of the learning process involved in the mastery of a technique, as well as his conception of the instrumentality and monologicality of technical knowledge, is difficult to sustain, especially in view of recent research in the psychology and anthropology of work. I then go on to point out that elsewhere in his oeuvre Gadamer himself is critical of the conception of work that emerges through the lens of the techne / phronesis distinction. Indeed, on these occasions he hints at a conception of work that points beyond the Arendt / Habermas conception towards a critical hermeneutics of working life. This alternative approach to work is particularly apparent in Gadamer’s appropriation of Hegel’s dialectic, in his understanding of play, and in some of his later diagnostic reflections on the spirit of the age. In section four, I offer some suggestions for explaining how the tensions evident in Gadamer’s approach to work came about. Here I am interested in what prevented Gadamer from embracing whole-heartedly the project of a hermeneutics of work that he himself helped to lay the foundations for. I conclude with some brief remarks on why we should seek to build upon these foundations and renew the project of a critical hermeneutics of work today. (shrink)

Nursing and nurses rely upon qualitative research to understand the intricacies of the human condition. Acknowledging the subjective nature of reality and commonly founded in a constructivist epistemology, qualitative approaches offer opportunities for uncovering insights from the perspective of the individual participants, the insider's view, and the construction of representations that maintain an intimacy with the subject's realities. Debate continues, however, about what is needed for a qualitative construction to be considered an authentic understanding of a subject's realities. Authenticity in (...) the context of qualitative research has been described as entailing consideration of a number of well‐trodden dimensions: fairness, ontological, educative, catalytic and tactical. Taking these dimensional requirements as key, this paper argues that authenticity may not always be as well‐developed through some of the standard practices in qualitative research as perhaps expected. In particular, qualitative understandings of authenticity stress that participants should not be merely reported on but instead should be dynamically involved in and changed by the constructions and interpretations of data developed throughout the research process. As this paper illustrates, such engagements appear problematic for qualitative research approaches that are beholden to designative commitments in the context of language and meaning‐making and which tend to prioritise commonality and generality at the expense of individual authenticity. An alternative qualitative approach, Hermeneutic Constructivism, is proposed as better able to achieve the requirements of the dimensions of authenticity. As outlined, this approach is well‐placed to present an understanding of human experience through a genuinely expressivist approach and transcends the stress upon the common or the general that can be pervasive and problematic. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to investigate how sexist ideology distorts our conceptions of sexual violence and the hermeneutical gaps such an ideology yields. I propose that we can understand the problematic issue of hermeneutical gaps about sexual violence with the help of Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice. By distinguishing between hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical misfire, we can distinguish between the hermeneutical gap and its consequences for the victim of sexual violence and those of the perpetrator of (...) such violence. I then argue that perpetrators are both morally responsible and accountable for their acts, even if they are the result of a hermeneutical misfire. Ultimately, I show that with regard to sexual violence, we should opt for accountability to change the behaviour of the perpetrator and the social structure. Content warning: The paper discusses sexual violence and difficulties conceptualising experiences of such violence. (shrink)

In order to revise interpretive prejudgments, it is important to first recognize them for what they are. Problematically, the habitual overreliance on deficient prejudgments can make such recognition difficult. An impasse appears: How can one intervene on deficient interpretive resources if those very same resources conceal their deficiencies? I analyze James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” in which the protagonist Gabriel is highly resistant to internalizing experiences that might otherwise prompt him to revise his interpretive projections. I argue that Gabriel (...) only becomes aware of his interpretive shortcomings after an experience of profound hesitation that allows him to affectively sense the limitations of his prejudice. Drawing from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kristie Dotson, and Alia Al-Saji, I argue that Gabriel’s experience of hesitation temporarily denaturalizes his deeply entrenched sexism, circumventing the hermeneutical impasse described above. Read in this way, “The Dead” illustrates the power of affective experiences to unsettle highly resilient ways of seeing the world. (shrink)

The article reflects on the symbolic forms of domination developed in the social environment and the real games of power that they are hidden behind the representations in nowadays. It approaches the relation that the medias has in the representation context, being an instrument of domination for the processes ofconstruction of the important meanings for the structure of a society. The study calls the attention for the problematic theoretician presented for the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, writing on the agent and (...) society, through the antagonism and exclusion between itself. Others two philosophers worked in the research are Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Thinking on individuals separately, we have that as the participant ones to be responsible in all the constructionof ethical values, politicians, cultural among others that they guide the collective context. However, we will only get success in this question, if we know how to analyze the “search of the real”. (shrink)

Analizar epistemológicamente los problemas de salud requiere incorporar la epistemología a los programas de posgrado en ciencias de la salud. Con el propósito de caracterizar los campos problemáticos que fundamenten el diseño de un programa académico para el curso de epistemología en ciencias de la salud se realizó un estudio con el enfoque de la hermenéutica gadameriana en tres etapas. El punto de partida expone la concepción de hombre, conocimiento y epistemología. El horizonte de comprensión se elaboró con tendencias epistemológicas (...) hegemónicas. La fusión de horizontes integró las características de los siguientes campos problemáticos: epistemología de las ciencias de la salud, lógica de las ciencias de la salud, tendencias epistemológicas en ciencias de la salud, problemas epistemológicos de las ciencias de la salud. Se concluye que los campos problemáticos descritos introducen al estudiante a la reflexión de su práctica científica mediante el análisis racional, axiológico y crítico. Analyzing health problems from an epistemological point of view requires epistemology to be included on health sciences postgraduate courses programs. Aimed at characterizing the problematic fields used as basis for the design of a health sciences epistemology academic program, a study with an approach to Gadamer hermeneutics in three stages was carried out. The starting point shows man, knowledge and epistemology conceptions. The comprehension horizon was made with epistemological-dominant trends. The horizons merge included characteristics from the following problematic fields: health sciences epistemology, health sciences logic, epistemological trends in health sciences, health sciences epistemological problems. It was reached the conclusion that the described problematic fields introduce students to their scientific practice reflection through a rational, axiological and critical analysis. (shrink)

The dissertation project is a study of the rhetoric of "enlightenment" and the philosophy of modernity. It addresses two seemingly unrelated questions: "what is enlightenment?" and "what is May Fourth?" The investigation of these two questions is located in the contexts of Kant-Foucault-Habermas's dialogue on "what is enlightenment?" and Western sinology's re-presentation of Chinese modernity. One of the objectives of the present study is to critique modern sinology's re-presentation of Chinese modernity, which has reduced the latter into a latent statement (...) of the Enlightenment and a derivative language of Reason, and hence, to seek to determine the conditions of possibility to address the question of "what is May Fourth?" ;The study attempts to identify the problematics in the Kant-Foucault-Habermas context, in which enlightenment was treated as an enterprise to bridge the gap between theoretical reason and practical intelligence, reason and unreason, and expert knowledge and everyday praxis. The study suggests that mediation of hermeneutic understanding of text/tradition with political commitment to organize an enlightened society was treated differently in Confucian and modern Chinese political philosophy and historiographical discourse. Examination of that treatment, the study points out, may help provide a framework to further reflect upon some unresolved problems and anticipate some pratical difficulties in the Western genealogy of enlightenment. (shrink)

Heidegger's history of hermeneutics discovered nothing more than a “diluted” understanding of hermeneutics in Schleiermacher and Dilthey. In contrast, Gadamer's and Ricoeur's histories of hermeneutics placed little or no emphasis on the premodern period, focusing instead on the rise of the “hermeneutic problem” in Schleiermacher's work and the development of that problematic in works by Dilthey and Heidegger. Ricoeur added Gadamer to that list, recognizing that Gadamer was instrumental in the way he had received and perceived (...) the problem in question. Charles R. Bambach argues that it was, in fact, Karl Barth's “crisis theology” that had inspired Heidegger's “destructive” alternative to the conventional view of historical research. He revealed that he had followed Hegel when writing his history of hermeneutics, noting that his decision to do so had consequences for the way he depicted the rise of hermeneutics; and the way his history of hermeneutics ended. (shrink)

Debates in feminist political philosophy often focus on what problematic(s) to use in order to understand normative ideals, gendered differences, and their histories. For the purposes of this chapter, I will contrast two important problematics in these debates, the procedural/deliberative politics in the tradition of Critical Theory, represented here by Seyla Benhabib, and the poststructuralist or postmodern politics, represented here by Judith Butler. The goal of the contrast will be to set up the contribution that Gadamer’s work can make (...) to contemporary feminist philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to problematize Slavoj Žižek’s use of the apocalyptic tradition in his political philosophy, especially focusing on the consequences it has for his understanding of hope. Especially, I find his strong emphasis on the disjunction between the state before and after the radical event implies a radical discontinuity between the present state and the state of emancipation, that the possibility falls away of any kind of criteria for a useful distinction between authentic and inauthentic events. Such (...) a lack of a more developed hermeneutics of discernment opens up for a potential ‘decisionism’ in Žižek’s work despite itself; decisionism in the sense of the evental decision itself provides the criteria for what counts as a legitimate emancipation rather than any preconceived criteria. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Addressing Alterity:Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative RelationDiane DavisTeaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain.—Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and InfinityThere is always the matter of a surplus that comes from an elsewhere and that can no more be assimilated by me, than it can domesticate itself in me. A teaching that may part ways with Heidegger's motif of our (...) being able to learn only what we already understand—when does learning take place? what do we already understand?—the Conversation belongs, as ethical relation, to the effort of thinking the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger. None of this amounts to thinking an object.—Avital Ronell, DictationsFrom Rhetorical Power to Reception Histories Steven Mailloux has brilliantly performed and explicated a "rhetorical hermeneutics" that demonstrates the "practical inseparability of interpretation and language use and thus of the discourses that theorize those practices, hermeneutics and rhetoric" (1998, 3). Many rhetoricians have challenged the specifics of Mailloux's various arguments and have more generally objected that "rhetorical hermeneutics" leans too far toward the hermeneutical, reducing rhetoric to an analytic or critical art and giving its productive (political) function the squeeze.1 Yet within these lively debates, very few have challenged his basic premise that rhetoric and hermeneutics are inextricably intertwined: the question has not been whether they are indissociable but which side of the production-reception coin rhetorical studies ought to emphasize.2 Michael Leff, for example, flipped Mailloux's adjective-noun relation to spotlight production, promoting a "hermeneutical rhetoric" that focuses more on political than literary texts; nonetheless, he agrees that "all interpretive work involves participation in a rhetorical exchange, and that every rhetorical exchange involves some interpretive work" (1997, 197-98). [End Page 191] Rosa Eberly goes further in Citizen Critics, offering a hermeneutical rhetoric that is less interested in "already-written discourses" than in spotlighting "rhetoric's power as an art productive of discourses and subjectivities for the present and the future" (2000, 34). Yet Eberly, too, affirms Mailloux's basic premise, which was nudged in the direction of conflation in the introduction to the 1997 collection Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, in which the editors, Walter Jost and Michael Hyde note in passing that their title can "be understood as virtually tautological."And there is of course no doubt that rhetoric has a hermeneutic dimension; or, more carefully, that rhetoric constitutes the hermeneutic dimension. If "hermeneutics" indicates "the art of understanding," as Friedrich Schleirmacher wanted, then interpretation clearly depends upon production.3 "Rhetoric not only has its place within the sphere of objects surveyed by hermeneutics," as Werner Hamacher puts it, "but also constitutes an integral component of every hermeneutic operation. Every step in an interpretation corresponds to a rhetorical—or grammatical—figure" (1996, 70). Put more bluntly: intelligibility, including self-intelligibility, is a tropological product; cognition itself is a trope that can in no way be secured. Hermeneutics—as it's being used here—is completely dependent on, even absorbed by, rhetoric.4 I have no problem with this. Nor with Mailloux's suggestion that the reverse is also true:In some ways rhetoric and interpretation are practical forms of the same extended human activity: Rhetoric is based on interpretation; interpretation is communicated through rhetoric. Furthermore, as a reflection on practice, hermeneutics and rhetorical theory are mutually defining fields: hermeneutics is the rhetoric of establishing meaning, and rhetoric the hermeneutics of problematic linguistic situations.(Mailloux 1998, 4)I don't disagree: As the production and appropriation of meaning, rhetoric and hermeneutics are an indissociable team; together, they complete understanding's circle. I take this as a given.However, I want to suggest that there is also a non-hermeneutical dimension of rhetoric that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up significations to comprehension. This dimension is reducible neither to figuration nor to what typically goes by the name persuasion; it is devoted to a certain reception, but not to the appropriation of meaning. Preceding and exceeding all hermeneutic interpretation, it deals not in signified meaning but in the address itself, in the exposure to the other; it deals not... (shrink)

This article argues that rape myths and domestic abuse myths constitute hermeneutical injustices. Drawing on empirical research, I show that the prevalence of these myths makes victims of rape and of domestic abuse less likely to apply those terms to their experiences. Using Sally Haslanger's distinction between manifest and operative concepts, I argue that in these cases, myths mean that victims hold a problematic operative concept, or working understanding, which prevents them from identifying their experience as one of rape (...) or of domestic abuse. Since victims in this situation lack the conceptual resources needed to render their experience sufficiently intelligible, they are suffering a form of hermeneutical injustice. Attending to this distinctive case sheds new light not only on the functioning of social myths of this kind but on the nature of hermeneutical injustice itself, since the case of the victim who accepts myths is importantly different from other cases of hermeneutical injustice discussed in the literature to date. In practical terms, this analysis supports calls for juries in rape trials to be warned about rape myths at the start of the trial, and may have implications for calls for statutory Sex and Relationships Education in schools. (shrink)

A key to the shortcomings and confusions afflicting 20th century social science seems to be problematic moral underpinnings or "disguised ideologies" that drive much of its research and theory. Philosophical hermeneutics shows great promise for diagnosing this condition and reorienting human science inquiry in helpful ways. However, it has been suggested by a number of thoughtful critics that hermeneutics has not yet taken the full measure of the kinds of "power" that can imbue and distort human communication, (...) including social theory and research. This paper addresses several of these critiques, finds merit in them, but argues that such concerns about power may be able to be addressed more adequately by a hermeneutic approach than by the viewpoints from which they are raised. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This paper summarizes the longstanding debate over psychology's fragmentation by illustrating two principal impediments to the fostering of consensus and unity. The paper then discusses the important benefits of past dialogue concerning these issues, suggesting that some progress has been made in dealing with problems of disunity and fragmentation, particularly at the metatheoretical and philosophical levels. This general discussion then forms the backdrop for the following articles, which together form a single argument in favor of a hermeneutic approach to the (...) problem of fragmentation. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the intuition that underpins Vattimo's thesis that thought is weak. It is the intuition that our ways of thinking depend not just on what there is, but on our activities, including the activity of interpretation. The following then seems to follow naturally from this: If we cannot factor out the contribution that the activity of interpretation plays in delimiting the very structure of thought, the idea that thought can sometimes operate as a transparent window on (...) how things are becomes problematic - thought is weak. That conclusion can seem obvious and well-grounded. In this paper I argue that it is not. I argue that the thesis that the contours of thought are in part a function of what we do does not mean that our concepts cannot be assessed with respect to the plain truth about how things are. (shrink)

In this article, I demonstrate that Friedrich Nietzsche offers us a unique form of hermeneutic critique. In particular, I contend that when reading Nietzsche’s perspectivism and will to power in light of each other, they provide us with the tools to overcome habits of interpretation through the concepts of genealogy and creative hermeneutics. I show this in three sections. In section one, I introduce Nietzsche’s perspectivism and situate it within his concept of the will to power. In doing so, (...) I demonstrate that interpretations exist amidst a complex field of agonistic, reciprocal relations in life’s constant production of meaning. In section two, I then analyze how certain interpretations sediment into habits, forming harmful blind spots in interpretive activity. Such habits, Nietzsche shows, when privileged as prima facie ‘True’ and left uncontested exclude different ways of interpreting and existing, stagnating the production of meaning and denying the agonistic conditions of life. In the final section, I argue that Nietzsche critiques such habits in the two directions of genealogy and creative hermeneutics. Through the backward approach of genealogy, Nietzsche problematizes the habit, excavates its lowly origin, and deconstructs its supposed universality. Through the forward approach of creative hermeneutics, he overcomes and reinterprets them out of their origins, experiments with difference and multiplicity, and engages in an ongoing critique to open up new perspectives. (shrink)

The article reflects on the symbolic forms of domination developed in the social environment and the real games of power that they are hidden behind the representations in nowadays. It approaches the relation that the medias has in the representation context, being an instrument of domination for the processes ofconstruction of the important meanings for the structure of a society. The study calls the attention for the problematic theoretician presented for the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, writing on the agent and (...) society, through the antagonism and exclusion between itself. Others two philosophers worked in the research are Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Thinking on individuals separately, we have that as the participant ones to be responsible in all the constructionof ethical values, politicians, cultural among others that they guide the collective context. However, we will only get success in this question, if we know how to analyze the “search of the real”. (shrink)

The article reflects on the symbolic forms of domination developed in the social environment and the real games of power that they are hidden behind the representations in nowadays. It approaches the relation that the medias has in the representation context, being an instrument of domination for the processes ofconstruction of the important meanings for the structure of a society. The study calls the attention for the problematic theoretician presented for the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, writing on the agent and (...) society, through the antagonism and exclusion between itself. Others two philosophers worked in the research are Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Thinking on individuals separately, we have that as the participant ones to be responsible in all the constructionof ethical values, politicians, cultural among others that they guide the collective context. However, we will only get success in this question, if we know how to analyze the “search of the real”. (shrink)

I begin by expressing thanks to Paul Rabinow. As a Foucault scholar, I am personally indebted to him for that wonderful book he wrote with Hubert Dreyfus, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structrualism and Hermeneutics, which served as my introduction to the Foucauldian philosophical enterprise. I am honored to respond to his Coss lecture on the philosophical methods of Foucault and Dewey that shape his work in philosophy and anthropology.I begin by quoting two lengthy yet revealing passages—one from Foucault's "Life: Experience (...) and Science" and the other from Dewey's "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy"—that will set the stage for this discussion:Phenomenology expected "lived experience" to supply the originary meaning .. (shrink)

Hermeneutics is the systematic exploration of the structure of cultural meaning mediated through the experience of the sign. At its foundations there is language. But language is more than a catalogue of forms of signification; it is radically the experience of the sign in those relations with others which constituteintersubjectivity. What is the experience of the sign or the experience of signifying? At the level of structural linguistics, the sign signifies in virtue of its form.The sign is to that (...) extent a relational concept; it is diacritical — formed by the systematic relations which give it value as a linguistic element. Yet while fundamentally true, the diacritical description of the sign presupposes the experience of the sign. The diacritical description of the sign which has become the hallmark of linguistic studies of meaning since Saussure assumes the intersubjective nature of the sign and that the recognition of meaning in language is perceptual in character. There is then a deeper dimension of the sign upon which its understanding rests: the exploration of the intersubjective and perceptual structure of the moment of signifying.To firmly come to grips with the nature of interpretation and the nature of the questions which form the problematic of hermeneutics, it is necessary, therefore,to go beneath the formal structure of the sign to the material experience of the sign where that formal structure becomes the modality of linguistic meaning. The foundations of hermeneutics rest upon the most concrete experience of the sign which is the experience of the sign within the folds of the flesh and in thelanguage of desire. The reflections which follow are an interrogation of those two dimensions. They form, in the manner of phenomenology, constitutionalstudies for they raise the question of the primitive experience within which the sign is constituted as a signifying experience. (shrink)

This article develops the thesis that normative social orders are always fore-structured by horizons of possibilities. The thesis is spelled out against the background of a criticism of ethnomethodology for its hermeneutic deficiency in coping with radical reflexivity. The article contributes to the debates concerning the status of normativity problematic in the cultural disciplines. The concept of hermeneutic pre-normativity is introduced to connote the interpretative fore-structuring of normative inter-subjectivity. Radical reflexivity is reformulated in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology.

The word “Hermeneutics” has an exotic aura that may seem uncharacteristic of Locke. It was not one that he employed, nor is it commonly used by his contemporary interpreters, which are reasons enough to require an explanation of its prominence in the title and in the discussion that follows. “Locke’s theory and practice of interpretation” may seem a plainer and more suitable choice of words to characterize the subject of this study, although it is a less convenient alternative, employing (...) several words to express what could be said well enough by one. However, my choice of “hermeneutics” has been prompted by other considerations than the mere economy of words. It is to be preferred, because of its rich associations, which, I believe, direct interpreters to themes in Locke’s philosophy that otherwise might go unnoticed. And this should lead to the discovery of a more fulsome and deeper, although perhaps more problematic wisdom, than is commonly supposed to be found in his writings, and perhaps also to a sense of greater, although here also more problematic, unity among them. The meaning of the word and its cognates afford us a more informative philosophical prospect than the more limited Early Modern, by harking back to Antiquity and pointing forward to Kant and beyond, facilitating the discovery in Locke’s writings of resonances with past tradition and anticipations of philosophical problems and solutions with which it is commonly supposed he had little to do. The aim of this exercise is not to fit Locke into new surroundings, but to consider him anew, hermeneutically, which necessitates that attention be paid to internal contexts of Locke’s several writings, and the “thread and coherence” of his various discourses. A comparison of these internal contexts should make it possible to decide whether there may not be a mode of thinking common to them all that, once identified and clarified, may serve as a trace or connector that unites them into a single expression of thought. (shrink)

Foucault and the problematics of the will in Cassian and Augustine Although John Cassian and Augustine are contemporaries involved in debates on (free) will, sin and grace, Foucault in Confessions of the Flesh closely examines these two authors in different text parts without confronting their positions regarding their conceptualization of the libido and the problem of a sinful will. In this article Augustine’s and Cassian’s view of this problematics is elaborated as two positions in the same debate. It is argued (...) that Foucault, reading Cassian as a monastic author introducing new forms of submission, confession and meticulous hermeneutics of the self, undervalues the act that the demand of mortification of the will through unconditional obedience can be seen as part of self-practices and exercises of the will. (shrink)

In _Interpreting Interpretation_, William E. Rogers searches for a model for literary education. This model should avoid both of two undesirable alternatives. First, it should not destroy any notion of discipline in the traditional sense, terminating in the stance of Rorty's "liberal ironist." Second, it should not regard literary education as an attempt to cause students to ingest a pre-determined mix of facts and cultural values, terminating in the stance of E. D. Hirsch's "cultural literate." From the semiotics of C. (...) S. Peirce, Rogers develops the notion of interpretive system. The interpretive system called textual hermeneutics is used to interpret interpretation. From that perspective, the world looks like a text. Applying the principle rigorously allows an articulation of the problematic relations among interpretation, philosophy, and language itself. _Interpreting Interpretation_ clarifies the conception of textual hermeneutics as an ascetic discipline by showing the consequences of this conception for interpreting canonical texts and for humanities education in general. Discussions of poetry by Robert Frost and by John Ashbery illustrate how this conception applies to an analysis of literary texts. Ultimately, the book offers a Peircean alternative to the educational theories implied in the pragmatism of John Dewey and of Richard Rorty. Rogers provides a new vocabulary for talking about what people are doing when they read, write, speak, and hear interpretive statements about texts. The new vocabulary acknowledges the great difficulty of "teaching texts" in the face of postmodern anxieties about pluralism, relativism, or nihilism. What emerges is not curriculum but method—an argument that the humanities teach not texts but interpretive systems. (shrink)

The essay’s argument is twofold: First, it contends that Ricœur’s articulation of the social imaginary in the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, reveals a turn to a general theory of culture, which is best understood as a shift from a hermeneutics of culture to a cultural hermeneutics. This move forms part of his philosophical anthropology of “real social life.” The essay proposes it is epitomized in Ricœur’s changing reception of Cassirer. Second, the essay hermeneutically reconstructs the emergence of (...) this turn in Ricœur’s intellectual trajectory, and, in so doing, contends that it is connected to a rearticulation of both the phenomenological reduction and the symbolic function that took place in the mid- to late 1960s. Ricœur’s developing response to the phenomenological problematic of the world horizon underlies these further phenomenological-hermeneutic considerations. The essay concludes with a brief sketch of Ricœur’s understanding of the symbolic mediation of action as a reconfiguration of the hermeneutical actualization of phenomenological preconditions of the symbolic. (shrink)

Hartmann's way of conceiving what he terms "the actual ought-to-be [aktuales Seinsollen]" offers a fruitful approach to crucial issues in the phenomenology of action. The central issue to be dealt with concerns the description of the "constitution" of anticipated possibilities as projects for action. Such potentialities are termed "problematic possibilities" and are contrasted with "open possibilities" in most of the works published by Husserl as well as those published by Alfred Schutz. The description given by Alfred Schutz emphasized that (...) the projecting of possibilities is thoroughly conditioned by the agent's habitual beliefs and interests. Schutz, however left open the possibility that other factors might affect the projecting of courses of action and the choosing of one in preference to others. In particular, he left open the possibility that the agent come to take an interest in possibilities in which she had no prior interest. More recent interpretations of his position on this issue have left this possibility undiscussed or else excluded it altogether. The result has been that a sort of value nihilism (subjectivism, sociologism, lingualism, anthropologism, historicism, psychologism, etc.) came to prevail in the phenomenological description of actions. A quite parallel development occurred in interpretations of Heidegger's account of actions (of "explication [Auslegung]" in the vocabulary of Being and Time). Heidegger expressly and emphatically rejected most ways of conceiving values in discussing the forms of action (circumspection and assertion in the vocabulary of Sein und Zeit). it came quite generally to be assumed that he subscribed to some variation of nihilism regarding values despite his insistence in the "Letter on Humanism" that he meant no such thing. The literature on this subject has concentrated on Scheler's work to the complete exclusion of Hartmann's axiology — as happened in Parvis Ermad's Heidegger and the Phenomenology of Values, His Critique of Intentionality, foreword by Walter Biernel (Glen Ellyn, Illinois: Torey Press, 1981). Scheler's view entails the radical separation of ontic traits from axiotic traits, of what-is from what-ought-to-be. However, for Hartmann, the set of ontic traits that becomes actual when laws about what-ought-to-be are satisfied is identical with the set of traits that ought-to-be, Hartmann's way of conceiving the ought-to-be, the actual ought-to-be, and the three-fold structure of the finalistic nexus seems entirely compatible with Heidegger's way of thinking about actions. They are also an enlightening supplement to Schutz's description of "Choosing Among Projects of Action" (in Collected Papers 1, 67-96). That description requires that choice and action be thoroughly conditioned by psychological, social, and historical facts about the agent. However, nothing of this vital determination of actions is sacrificed when these concepts that are so central to Hartmann's "absolutism" with respect to values are introduced into the description. Their introduction provides an elaboration that Schutz himself neglected, perhaps due to pragmatic deference to biases which were prevalent then in the intellectual climate of philosophy and sociology in the U.S. Still, the transformation they bring is a significant improvement. It shows decisively that being conditioned linguistically, psychologically, socially, and historically does not enclose the choice among projects within a "Hermeneutical Circle" such as would exclude the possibility that agents be open to previously unfamiliar values. Hartmann's conception of the plurality as well as the absoluteness (or "objectivity") of primary goods allows, put in Kantian terms, that an agent may, however rarely, take an interest in possibilities such as she may never before have been interested in at all; or, put in Heideggerian terms, that she may come to care about possibilities such as have never concerned her before. (shrink)

This article critically engages with Castoriadis’s elucidation of autonomy. It does so by taking into account the implications of Castoriadis’s enduring interest in the ecological devastation of the natural world, on the one hand, and the changing configuration of his philosophical anthropology, on the other—especially in regard to his reconsideration of the creativity of nature in the 1980s and the reconfiguration of the nomos and physis problematic. It contextualizes these movements in his thought within a broader hermeneutic of modernity (...) that, following Johann Arnason, emphasizes the cultural currents of both Romanticism and the Enlightenment as constitutive of modernity as a field of tensions. In an extension of Arnason’s elaboration, however, the present article argues that a latent opening towards an ecological worldhood is implicit to Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity that, conversely, also finds Castoriadis at the limits of autonomy. (shrink)

In this contribution to Text Matters, I would like to introduce gender into my feminist response to Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of the capable subject. The aim is to make, phenomenologically speaking, “visible” the gendering of this subject in a hermeneutic problematic: that of a subject’s loss of confidence in her own ability to understand herself. Ricoeurian hermeneutics enables us to elucidate the generally hidden dimensions in a phenomenology of lost self-confidence; Ricoeur describes capability as “originally given” to (...) each lived body; but then, something has happened, gone wrong or been concealed in one’s loss of confidence. Ricoeur himself does not ask how the gender or sex of one’s own body affects this loss. So I draw on contemporary feminist debates about the phenomenology of the body, as well as Julia Kristeva’s hermeneutics of the Antigone figure, in order to demonstrate how women might reconfigure the epistemic limits of human capability, revealing themselves as “a horizon” of the political order, for better or worse. (shrink)

In analytic philosophy, the concept of trust is often considered primarily to be a three-place relation between trustor, trustee, and the domain of trust. The analysis of trust is unsatisfactory, however, if such a relationship is derivative of other forms of trust, and consequently the analysis has only succeeded in explaining a particular branch of trust rather than explaining the root. Annette Baier considers a climate of trust, with all the moral perils of intimacy, explanatorily superior to contract-based, rational trust (...) between non-intimate equals in modern Western philosophy and thus provides an example of how the traditional analytic model is problematic. In this paper, I propose another account on which the conventional three-place trust relationship investigated in analytic philosophy is derivative. Based on Heidegger's fundamental ontology, humans are constitutively hermeneutic. If Heidegger's fundamental ontology or a similar hermeneutic anthropology is accepted, then trust relationships between humans are explanatorily subordinated to trust relationships between readers and texts rather than the other way around, as traditional accounts suggest. This reversal has a significant impact not only on our analysis of trust, but also on moral theory, personal identity, and scientific method. My paper details both the reversal in explanatory primacy and the implications for these philosophical disciplines. (shrink)

This paper applies a Ricœurian ethics in a two-fold personal/societal critique, choosing as a case study the representation of an “other” in a newspaper article. The personal critique uses a historical narrative as a window. Through it, we see hysterical stories about national enemies—in this case the Greek Cypriots—imposing themselves upon the developing consciousness of a growing child. I describe my awakening—through Ricœur’s idea of the creativity of language—from the spell of these dominant normative national narratives to the possibility of (...) re-reading them creatively. Ricœur’s blueprint for engagement with such narrative structures holds out the promise of reading them in an ethical manner, and this is achievable through his linguistic hospitality. From there, this study, analyzing the ethical predicaments of mainstream journalism from the perspective of critical media studies, problematizes the issue of otherness in the news. The example taken up, a current Turkish newspaper article covering a Turkish Cypriot Parliamentarian’s remarks in session regarding the experiences of 1974 Cyprus, reveals how this otherization is actually constructed under the name of the journalistic profession. This essay then borrows a Ricœurian ethical perspective with a view to making news language more hospitable, repositioning both news organizations and news items alike within Ricœur’s ethical paradigm of leading a good life with and for others within just institutions. This conceptualization of the news item itself as a just institution is a change that journalists could make in order to bring the news more in line with a Ricœurian sense of ethics and away from the current dominant practices in mainstream journalism. (shrink)

In the spirit of Slavoj Žižek’s book, Hegel in a Wired Brain, this article asks how the questions central to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics are changed and complicated by the possibility of brain-to-brain communication and the datafication of thought made potential through brain-computer interfaces. By taking a phenomenological approach to understanding the nature of communication through a technology that does not require language for the transmission of ideas, this article explores how BCI communication confronts the ontological character of interpretation (...) as presented by Gadamer while also juxtaposing how the insights of Gadamer and Heidegger concerning temporality problematize materialist foundations of BCI communication. In the final analysis, it is argued that thought only becomes meaningful in accord with the temporality of Dasein and that hermeneutics remains central in BCI communication because the material replication of thought does not overcome the particular temporalities of historically effected consciousnesses. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine and evaluate Habermas’ thoughts on hermeneutical reßection as a methodology of social science based on his work titled Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (On The Logic of The Social Sciences). By starting from a theory of action approach focusing on the process of inquiring and understanding intentional action, Haber-mas developed a hermeneutical reßection approach emphasizing the importance of communicative experience between the researcher and the subject examined. This approach has emancipatory power because it encourages researchers to (...) thoroughly identify the ideological elements of social reality researched. Apart from all the advantages of Habermas’ methodological thought, his thinking should be evaluated critically because there are problematic aspects when viewed through the lens of ontology, methodology/method, and axiology. (shrink)

We propose a synthetic description of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with the aim of providing physicists and philosophers with an alternative linguistic and conceptual framework to address the logical and ontological problematics emerged in quantum mechanics. Phenomenology’s cognitive devices such as the dynamical relationship between object and horizon, the presumptive synthesis and the constitution of an ontology based on the indivisibility of object and subject, not only show hermeneutic efficacy when applied to the study of human perception, but may prove to be (...) sufficiently innovative to lead to novel insights towards the understanding of the quantum mechanical theoretical structure: the traditional tenet of quantum physics being in discontinuity with the major characteristics of classical physics is shaken at its fundaments and a new perspective of continuity between the two worlds is opened. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the possibility of a systematic yet non-methodological grounding for knowledge within the framework of hermeneutics. In opposition to formalistic and scientistic construals of philosophy, I argue that philosophy is essentially non-formalistic, nuanced, and contingent, characterized by circularity, ambiguity, and paradox. In rejecting formalized fixed positions and emphasizing circularity and contingency, I am concerned nevertheless to ensure that my account does not dissolve into random flux or empty indeterminacy. I look to articulate, therefore, a middle space between (...) radical closure and radical openness in an account I have termed anchored openness. ;In developing this account, I contrast it with other models of this middle space. In the accounts of Hegel and Derrida, the outcome is a one-sided extremism which proves unacceptable. The concept of the hermeneutic circle furnishes a valuable preliminary account, but it cannot provide the full elaboration of this perspective. Gadamer's account comes close to striking the appropriate balance between extremist poles and articulating the middle space, but because of its problematic objectivist and relativist implications, it also proves inadequate as a model of anchored openness. ;For a more salutary model that avoids the deficiencies of these accounts, I turn finally to Kant's Critique of Judgement. Through an analysis of the aesthetic judgement, I find the systematic yet open principles needed for this account: mediation and openness, subjective universality, and grounded free play. I conclude by suggesting possible future directions for the development of these principles. (shrink)

John Llewelyn's two books concern theories of understanding and signification in continental philosophy. Beyond Metaphysics? examines Heidegger's argument that existentials constitute a prescientific understanding of the "categories of scientific knowledge." He explores how the hermeneutic circle is beyond metaphysics, if metaphysics is regarded as the epistemological relation of objects presented to subjects. Following a chapter on how Husserl's phenomenology anticipates Heidegger's fundamental ontology, the remainder of the book is devoted to examining the extent to which some Continental philosophers agree or (...) disagree with Heidegger's notion of the fore-structure of understanding. In the more recent book, he extends his study of the break from subject-object dualism in modern theories of meaning to consider Derrida's anasemiology or problematizing of the logic of opposition that characterizes Western philosophy. The two books, therefore, are closely united, and the reader is well advised to study the two in order of publication. (shrink)

Addressing trauma as a phenomenon which happens on the level of the human psyche and body, this article explores the impact of the interlocking nature of human lingual and bodily being in discovering a fuller possibility of interpreting and understanding woundedness. The non-transparent and problematic character of trauma calls for a hermeneutic investigation in order to gain a far-reaching insight into what happens with us and in us in traumatic experience. The imperative to understand the situation of affliction is (...) an unending task which not only relies upon extant understandings but continually pro-vokes new ones. I argue that the process of healing, encompassing the spoken and bodily narrative, does not establish a secure equilibrium, but rather searches for self-restoring, healing energy and commences ever new understandings of what needs to be comprehended and healed. This article offers an examination of trauma as featured in three short stories by British authors: Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, to exemplify the possibilities of literature to shed light on the intricate nature of traumatic experience. It interrogates the ways in which literature, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis meaningfully converge. (shrink)

In the preceding pages, Husserl's objections to the content of Descartes'Meditations on First Philosophy have been reconstructed over the line ofargument in that work. The tone of his interpretation moved from ambivalence to outfight rejection. Husserl's ambivalence manifested itself intwo of the three meditations to which he pays significant attention. We sawthe much heralded methodological strategy of the First Meditation, uponclose examination, is not endorsed by Husserl, that he finds reason toprotest against the content of each individual skeptical argument and (...) seesthere in general a subjectivistic doctrine of consciousness already at work.Nevertheless, Husserl clearly wanted to preserve the essential intent of theCartesian method of doubt if not its letter, namely, the move toward callinginto question naive presuppositions about the world, raising the possibilityof its non-existence, thereby resuscitating sheer wonder about the world,and rendering it problematic in its relation to subjectivity. Historically, thisstrategy has precedent in the ancient Greek sophists, who, however unintentionally, Husserl claims were the first to manifest a transcendental im-pulse. Moving into the Second Meditation and the so-called discovery ofthe ego cogito, we found a stronger ambivalence on Husserl's part. Whileapplauding Descartes for uncovering the truth that lay hidden at the basis ofskepticism, the subsequent interpretation of the ego as soul and substantialentity clouds this inchoative insight into pure transcendental subjectivity.By the Third Meditation Husserl's ambivalence moved to out right rejection. There are a number of reasons why: the circularity of Descartes'theological theory of evidence ; the epistemologicalcommitment to a subjectivistic theory of consciousness; hisScheinprobleme along with the assumption of an objectivein-itself forever remote from intuition; the ontological commitment to twofinite substances; and the attempt to deductively redress the cognitiveschism created by these commitments through appeal to the principle ofcausality and the goodness of God. All these gave Husserl decisive occa-sion to take leave of the Cartesian path of meditation.A further reason why Husserl's meditations consistently break off in theThird Meditation is suggested by noticing the textual moment whereHusserl's silence begins. It is that moment where Descartes dips into theScholastic tradition for the concepts of objective and formal reality in orderto prove the existence of God. The problem, I suggest, is that here Des-cartes insufferably compromises his radicalness. More specifically, with theconcepts of objective and formal reality Descartes installs on the metaphysi-cal level the distinction between image and original already operative allalong in the earlier Meditations. Now, through the concepts of objective andformal reality, the image /original distinction is given ex-planatory power and raised to a truth so evident as to be beyond the reach ofmethodic doubt. The fact that this distinction is employed to deduce theexistence of God is not so much the phenomenological offense as themetaphysical naivete of positing a formal reality, an in itself, to account forthe very matters in question. (shrink)

V sklopu čedalje intenzivnejšega ukvarjanja z zgodovino hermenevtike v zadnjih letih se kaže Dilthej pogosto kot »klasik« tiste z Gadamerjem inkriminirane tradicionalne hermenevtike, s čimer je postavljen v pozicijo golega predhodnika filozofske hermenevtike oz. hermenevtične filozofije Heideggra in Gadamerja. Toda ta pogled, ki izhaja v glavnem iz Gadamerjeve koncepcije in se lahko zdi na prvi pogled povsem sprejemljiv, je problematičen in pomeni po mojem mnenju odločno prikrajšanje Diltheyevega filozofskega dosežka in njegovega prispevka hermenevtičnemu mišljenju.Within the context of the more and (...) more intensive research on the history of hermeneutics in recent years, Dilthey more and more often appears as a “classic” of the traditional hermeneutics incriminated by Gadamer, which puts him in the position of a mere predecessor of philosophical hermeneutics viz. hermeneutic philosophy of Heidegger and Gadamer. This view, however, stemming primarily from Gadamer’s conception and appearing to be quite acceptable at a first glance, is highly problematic and, in my opinion, contributes to a decisive diminution of Dilthey’s philosophical achievement and his contribution to hermeneutic thinking. (shrink)

The present paper uses the theme of dialectic and dialogue to begin unraveling the similarities and differences between the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and H.G. Gadamer. Ricoeur is shown to distance himself from Heidegger by insisting on a dimension of explanation and distanciation (which he sometimes identifies with Plato's `descending dialectic') that cannot be reduced to, or absorbed by, understanding and appropriation. This same move, however, leads him to reject Platonic dialogue, with the attendant prioritizing of oral conversation over (...) the written text, as a model for hermeneutics. Ricoeur therefore sees in Gadamer's recourse to such a model a regression to the problematic position of Heidegger. Yet the conception of philosophy as dialectical and dialogical which Gadamer finds in Plato is capable of responding to Ricoeur's objections. Where the fundamental difference between the hermeneutics of Ricoeur and Gadamer emerges is in the question of whether experience is fundamentally dialectical and whether language is inherently dialogical. (shrink)

Na preleção de verão de 1923, intitulada “Ontologia: hermenêutica da facticidade”, Martin Heidegger estabelece seu programa filosófico em termos de uma investigação fundamental, nomeada por ele como hermenêutica fenomenológica da facticidade. De acordo com esta, a interpretação da vida fática não se realiza sem que se tome o ser e o falar como fenômenos privilegiados, ou seja, sem que se recupere o vínculo essencial em que nós, seres humanos existentes, já nos descobrimos sendo no mundo como seres capazes de fala. (...) Tendo em vista que é a partir do constructo ser-no-mundo que o filósofo alemão consegue dar um passo atrás no esquema sujeito-objeto, não é por acaso então que ele busca encontrar, desde muito cedo, modos de dizer o ser que não mais o entifiquem, com o intuito de pensá-lo para além do registro da referência e, portanto, da objetivação. É com base nessa situação que se torna premente que sua análise tenha início a partir do horizonte do ente privilegiado, uma vez que é para este que o sentido do ser se torna um problema. Assim, este artigo parte da hipótese de que a hermenêutica da facticidade se constitui por conta da tentativa de Heidegger de ater-se ao problema do ser que compreende ser, tendo como premissa uma ampla problematização em torno da significação da palavra vida. Palavras-chave: Heidegger; hermenêutica; facticidade.: In the summer lecture of 1923, entitled Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Martin Heidegger established his philosophical program in terms of a fundamental research, named by him as phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity. According to this, the interpretation of the factical life is not achieved without taking the being and the speaking as privileged phenomena, i.e., without recovering the essential bond in which we, existent human beings, have already discovered ourselves being in the world as being capable of speaking. Given the fact that it is from the construct being-in-the-world that the German philosopher is able to step back on subject-object scheme, it is not by accident that he tries to find, since the beginning, ways of expressing being that no longer turn it into an entity, with the intention of thinking it beyond the scheme and, therefore, any objectualization registry. It is based on this situation that it is pressing that his analysis starts from the horizon of a privileged entity, since it is for this the sense of being becomes a problem. In fact, this paper starts from the hypothesis that hermeneutics of facticity is constituted due to Heidegger’s attempt on holding to the problem of being that understands being, with the premise of a wide problematization regarding the significance of the word life. Keywords: Heidegger; hermeneutics; facticity. (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)

The aim of this article is to sketch the procedural nature of the modus in which Deleuze reads the other philosophers. The hermeneutical problem indicated by the indecision to consider his books on different authors as an authorized interpretation or as fantasist utilization may be scattered if we understand his hermeneutical attempts both as interpretation and construction. In addition, this indecision affects the guild of Deleuzian exegetes in respect to the directory idea which could point out the general strategy of (...) his philosophy. (shrink)

Drawing on feminist and queer epistemologies, this article is concerned with the post-feminist media’s construction of girls’ sexual subjecthood. Broadly defined as a biopolitical ideal, post-feminism is here related to a set of principles of the neoliberal art of government. It will be argued that these principles ethically sustain the exponential mainstreaming of a post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence and its programme of governmentality. The article also links post-feminism to a particular methodology of subjectification, ultimately locating its hermeneutics of (...) adolescence within the pornographic and pharmacological imperatives of contemporary capitalism. On the empirical level, the analysis explores how techno-scientific discourses and bodily figurations (namely brains and hormones) enter the discursive apparatus of a Portuguese girls’ magazine, giving ideological ground to a distinctive production of adolescent body-subjects. Post-feminist media markets are finally discussed as a significant segment of the capitalist industrialisation of sexual difference that frames the general problematic of this study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ancient and Modern HermeneuticsDavid HalliburtonAncient and Modern Hermeneutics, by Gerald L. Bruns; xii & 318 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, $37.50.Modern hermeneutics, Bruns explains, has mainly gone in two directions. One is toward the transcendental ground-swells of Husserl, who remains committed to idealities, as exemplified in geometry. The second direction, taken by Heidegger, Gadamer, and Bruns (not to mention Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and the (...) Pragmatists) hews to the worldly rootedness of understanding; here each and all enjoy the capacity to comprehend—if not perfectly, at least perfectly well.Bruns divides his admirable opus into two large sections. Part One, on the Ancients, consists of essays on Socrates, Thucydides, the Hebrew Bible, allegory, the Jewish Midrash, and what may be broadly viewed as a correlative Islamaic text. He argues that Socrates’ ironic inclinations are not forensic ploys but manifestations of an authentic ontological disposition. (This ontological motif sounds throughout Bruns’s text.) Bruns’s Socrates has but to carry out the phusis that he himself is—in the undertow of which he cannot but be ironic even as, in being ironic, he cannot but be, like phusis, elusive and even impenetrable: “The point about Socrates is that we never know how to take him” (p. 32).Bruns handles ingeniously the problem of speeches that Thucydides “reported” but could not have heard. He argues that Thucydides provides a sort of simulacrum of the speeches. On this view, the historian does not attempt to report what the speakers actually said; instead he portrays implicitly the concrete historical situations (the modifiers are mine) in which orators orate: “the true author... would not be its original speaker nor its subsequent scribes but the situation that called for the speech to be made” (p. 58).In his challenging chapter on allegory, especially in Philo, Bruns approaches the former’s mystical commentary on the cherubim by problematizing familiar, restrictive distinctions. “In this case there can be no easy or gross distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric, the literal-minded and the wise....” To Philo “understanding is a form of recognition, of being turned toward and received into what before had been hidden or strange” (p. 102).Part Two, on the Moderns, treats of hermeneutic issues raised by Wordsworth [End Page 158] but even more paradigmatically by Luther; the tragic concept of experience; the question of tradition; radical hermeneutics; and the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. The journey ends in Bruns’s attempt to hypostatize an originary concept of freedom.To Bruns the liminal figure for modernity is Luther. It is a high hermeneutic moment that each of Luther’s students receives his own Bible with wide margins in which to copy the master’s—or conceivably his own—commentaries. Here Scripture is not merely grasped cognitively but is immediately, and, with full Deweyan and Diltheyan overtones, experienced. Luther for his part postulates that the text interprets itself. Concurring, and returning to the ontological motif noted above, Bruns proposes the one’s relation to a text “is ontological rather than simply exegetical. Luther’s distinction between law and gospel is a way of extending this ontological relation from the notion of a legal indictment to that of a spiritual one in which one’s self-understanding or self-identity is reconstituted by the text” (p. 146).Later Bruns deftly contrasts Hegel’s Umkehrung, the “movement toward enlightenment and the self-certainty of absolute consciousness” (p. 157), with Heidegger’s resolute refusal to appropriate or manipulate the world into which he, with everyone else, has been thrown. This attitude is somewhat akin to negative capability or wise passiveness—no English word or phrase gets it right—and requires a kind of letting-be, or letting-go. Bruns puts the matter about as well as one can, in short compass: “Thinking... is not reasoning or questioning but listening; its goal is not conceptual representation by Gelassenheit, or a letting go, releasement, and ‘openness to the mystery’” (p. 158).In his chapter on romantic hermeneutics, Bruns returns to Luther who, though stressing the empowerment of the individual reader, nonetheless regards the text as a vital force entering into and transforming the... (shrink)