_Brings together all of Gadamer's published writings on Celan's poetry, and makes them available in English for the first time. This is accessible commentary on a notoriously difficult poet._.

Interpretation and politics merge in one the famous story of Joseph's power of dream interpretation in the Hebrew Bible. Rome's College of Augurs reinforces the entwinement of interpretation, power, religion, and folklore that one can also find in the earlier context of the Delphic Oracle. Augury reminds us that understanding happens in the context of an event, a context that presupposes one is missing something, lacking the necessary vision or foresight, and help is called for. Most of the contemporary scholars (...) who write about philosophical hermeneutics, the tradition which includes Martin Heidegger and Hans‐Georg Gadamer, are allergic to politics in the proletarian sense of that word. Party politics and parliamentarian procedures receive almost no attention in the secondary literature on contemporary hermeneutics. Assertion about the political incompetence of philosophy opens the door to an esoteric tradition in philosophy that includes Plato's “secret doctrine”, and stretches back to Pythagoras and Heraclitus. (shrink)

The Greek god Hermes, the messenger and god of thieves, the giver of laws and the alphabet, is a key figure for thinking about the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric. The philosophers have been able to cloak their distaste for people in general, evident most tellingly in Plato's allegory of the cave. On more familiar rhetorical territory, Nancy Worman in Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens reminds Aristotle's distaste for audiences. The ancient rhetoricians recognized the importance of appearances, and for obvious (...) reasons emphasized in their treatises that they wanted orators to be virtuous and morally upright people. In most kinds of legal and scriptural interpretation, authors build cases from precedent. As a way to capture the salient features of this intersection of hermeneutics and rhetoric, the reader could conjure up the differences in biblical hermeneutics between Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). (shrink)

Geoff Waite's book is crucial for coming to terms with almost all the important issues of the day and of the future, as the subtitle and length might suggest. Waite is provocative, learned, thorough, and careful in his readings from across the political spectrum, even to the point of providing cogent explanations for his use of punctuation. Surprisingly, Waite points to a host of Canadian figures—Northrop Frye, David Cronenberg, Marshall McLuhan, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Kroker— to construct his striking case, making (...) the book even more compelling reading for Canadians. (shrink)

The Man in the High Castle is an Amazon TV show, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, about an "alternate present" (beginning in the 1960s) in which Germany and Japan won World War II, with the former Western US occupied by Japan, the former Eastern U.S. occupied by Nazi Germany, and a small "neutral zone" between them. A theme of the story is that in this alternative world there is eager speculation, fueled by the illicit newsreel, The Grasshopper Lies (...) Heavy, about how the world would have been different if America had won the war. -/- In The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy, twenty-two professional thinkers look at philosophical issues raised by this ongoing enterprise in "alternative history." One question is whether it really made a profound difference that the Allies won the war, and exactly what differences in everyday life we may expect to arise from an apparent historical turning point. Could it be that some dramatic historical events have only superficial consequences, while some unnoticed occurrences lead to catastrophic results? (shrink)

Stanley Cavell's new book challenges professional philosophers in the United States with his attempt to rehabilitate Emerson and Thoreau as philosophers and to enlarge everyone's vision of the humanities, so that we might keep our eyes on the connections among the disciplines of romanticism, philosophy, and film. Call this eye positioning non-pathological strabismus. From Cavell's viewpoint, professional philosophers keep Emerson and Thoreau out of the philosophical curriculum, because the two are like the Elephant Men of philosophy, oddities that are fine (...) in side-shows like literature departments, but two who would be embarrassments to any philosophers who might claim the two as their own. "Emerson and Thoreau," Cavell says, "are as much threats, or say embarrassments, to what we have learned to call philosophy as they are to what we call religion, as though philosophy had, and has, an interest in its own behalf in looking upon them as amateurs, an interest, I think I might say, in repressing them". Cavell recognizes that he too is an oddity, but perhaps not an oddity who is trying to get even, to exact revenge. This talk of oddness comes from Cavell's essay called "Being Odd, Getting Even: Descartes, Emerson, Poe," one of seven lectures that appears in In Quest of the Ordinary. (shrink)

This book covers new ground in the English scholarship on Gadamer's work. In Gadamer's Hermeneutics, Joel Weinsheimer gives a detailed reading of Gadamer's major text, Truth and Method, and in Gadamer, Georgia Warnke offers a more general interpretation of Gadamer's work, but neither of these works deals specifically with the early Gadamer, with Gadamer the philologist at work trying to understand Plato and Aristotle.

In this contribution to an exchange of views about “lyric philosophy,” the author argues that the philosopher-poet Jan Zwicky, beginning as early as her dissertation at the University of Toronto, has championed the nonlogical, including the ineffable, the oracular, and the mystical, and that more recently those concerns have merged in a more focused way in her attention to ecological issues. The impulse to fix philosophy and the environment depends in her work mainly on further linguistic statements and declarations, and (...) on occasional overt rejections of traditional political remedies. Thus, the audience for her campaign against analytic philosophy, for example, does not seem to reach beyond the walls of higher education in North America. Zwicky has aligned herself with an esoteric philosophical tradition that has sought to achieve its aims covertly — meaning, for one thing, that it becomes difficult to measure the success of those aims, since they are deliberately meant to be unavailable to public scrutiny. Those aims are not dependent on the general populace's involvement or engagement. Indeed, the author concludes, the general populace has been viewed consistently in the esoteric philosophical tradition as weak and resistant, if not hostile, to philosophical thought. (shrink)

Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone. Pity is not only inefficient; it is also insulting. And besides, how can you pity another when you yourself suffer ignominiously? Compassion is as common as it is because it does not bind you to anything! Nobody in this world has yet died from another's suffering. And the one who said that he died for us did not die; he was (...) killed. (E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair). (shrink)