This book covers all of Hans-George Gadamer major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Gadamer's thought. Students will discover information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include a clear definition of all the key terms used in Gadamer's writings and detailed synopses of his key works, including his magnum opus, Truth and Method. The Dictionary also includes entries on Gadamer's major philosophical influences, from Plato to Heidegger, and his contemporaries, including Derrida and Habermas. (...) It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Gadamer's 'philosophical hermeneutics', offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. (shrink)

A Companion to Hermeneutics is a collection of original essays from leading international scholars that provide a definitive historical and critical compendium of philosophical hermeneutics. Offers a definitive historical, systematic, and critical compendium of hermeneutics Represents state-of-the-art thinking on the major themes, topics, concepts and figures of the hermeneutic tradition in philosophy and those who have influenced hermeneutic thought, including Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault, Habermas, and Rorty Explores the art and theory of interpretation as it intersects (...) with a number of philosophical and inter-disciplinary areas, including humanism, theology, literature, politics, education and law Features contributions from an international cast of leading and upcoming scholars, who offer historically informed, philosophically comprehensive, and critically astute contributions in their individual fields of expertise Written to be accessible to interested non-specialists, as well asprofessional philosophers. (shrink)

This chapter looks at the genesis of Heidegger’s reflections on affect, embodied speaking together, the nature of possibility and the critique of actuality, which form the soil in which the later existential analysis of Being and Time sinks its roots. These original reflections are to be found in the 1924 summer semester lecture course entitled Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. On the basis of this, the chapter shows how the early lectures help us understand what happens to Heidegger’s reflections on (...) affect, dynamis, and being together with others, shaping the development of his later critique of the metaphysics of actuality in both Being and Time and in the Contributions to Philosophy. (shrink)

For Heidegger, world is constitutively bound up with human being’s way of being. Yet after Being and Time he criticizes an excessively one-sided pragmatic reading of his concept of world, insisting that world is more than a referential totality of use involvements, tools, or existential projections. This article examines how Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis should be understood to promote both a practical orientation as well as a more transcendental dimension. The centrality of praxis in Heidegger’s work will not be contested. What (...) will be explored is whether what Heidegger calls “worldliness” or the “phenomenon of world” can be reduced to contexts of use relations or social practices and projects. The argument is made that world, for Heidegger, should be understood as an open space of meaning emergence through which diverse activities, some of which are practical, first become accessible to the human being. The claim will be advanced that world is more than the human being’s disclosive understanding and that an overly pragmatic interpretation circumvents the surpassive dimension of world. (shrink)

This paper addresses a hitherto unexamined issue in the work of Michel Henry, namely, his critical interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of “appearing” and “speaking.” Throughout his distinguished career, Henry went to great philosophical lengths to distance himself from traditional phenomenology and from the work of Heidegger. However, for the most part, Henry’s critical reading of Heidegger has received little attention from phenomenologists and even that has been cursory. Hence, the central aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to show (...) that Henry’s critique of the “appearing” and “speaking” of the world remains unanswered; and (2) to show that a proper reading of Heidegger throws light on the shortcomings of Henry’s own project. Hence, because the second objective follows necessarily from having achieved the first, this paper submits that what is first needed is a re-assessment of Henry’s critique in light of a more accurate understanding of the depth-dimension of “appearing” and “speaking,” which is, I argue, evinced in the analysis of the voice of conscience in Being and Time. The paper subsequentlyoffers what I see as a more appropriate interpretation of the call of conscience in terms of a radicalised “transcendence in immanence” which is not reducible to the mere exteriority of inner-worldly beings. The paper concludes by arguing that the voice of conscience underscores the shortfalls of Henry’s critique of the “appearing” and “speaking” of the world in Heidegger. (shrink)

_A Companion to Hermeneutics_ is a collection of original essays from leading international scholars that provide a definitive historical and critical compendium of philosophical hermeneutics. Offers a definitive historical, systematic, and critical compendium of hermeneutics Represents state-of-the-art thinking on the major themes, topics, concepts and figures of the hermeneutic tradition in philosophy and those who have influenced hermeneutic thought, including Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault, Habermas, and Rorty Explores the art and theory of interpretation as it intersects (...) with a number of philosophical and inter-disciplinary areas, including humanism, theology, literature, politics, education and law Features contributions from an international cast of leading and upcoming scholars, who offer historically informed, philosophically comprehensive, and critically astute contributions in their individual fields of expertise Written to be accessible to interested non-specialists, as well asprofessional philosophers. (shrink)

The following examines Heidegger’s analysis of world and Dasein from a transcendental perspective. It is argued that Heidegger’s reflections on the interconnected themes of world and Dasein reveal the tensions that exist between the transcendental claims before and after Being and Time and the analysis of worldliness. It begins by looking at Heidegger’s early analysis of Husserl’s critique of psychologism and naturalism, assessing what this tells us about Heidegger’s analysis of world and nature. It subsequently addresses Heidegger’s transformation of Husserlian (...) phenomenology, and intentionality in particular, arguing against interpreters who claim Heidegger’s interconnected concepts of Dasein and world are reducible to one another and hence phenomenologically problematic. In order to respond to this reading, the article examines the twin themes of, on the one hand, transcendental constitutive analysis in Heidegger’s work, Dasein as disclosive and ‘world entering’, and, on the other hand, the centrality of the world and the realm of nature as always more than Dasein’s constitutive relationship to it. In order to understand what Heidegger means by worldliness, the article will look at Heidegger’s reflections on nature as the world’s other, which nonetheless needs to be understood on the basis of worldliness. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the towering figures of contemporary Continental philosophy, is best known for Truth and Method, where he elaborated the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics," a programmatic way to get to what we do when we engage in interpretation. Donatella Di Cesare highlights the central place of Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, in Gadamer's work, brings out differences between his thought and that of Heidegger, and connects him with discussions and debates in pragmatism. This is a sensitive and thoroughly readable (...) philosophical portrait of one of the 20th century’s most powerful thinkers. (shrink)

(2010). Interpreting Plato Phenomenologically: Relationality and Being in Heidegger's Sophist. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 41, Confrontations, pp. 170-192.

The influence of Husserlian phenomenology on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has been the subject of some analysis in the secondary literature, with scholars emphasizing both Gadame...

ABSTRACTThis article examines Heidegger's assessment of negativity and finitude in the late 1930s and his enlargement of these issues in the name of a leap from one type of philosophy, one type of beginning, to a wholly other beginning. The guiding concerns of this article are negativity, finitude and the leap, and how these overlapping concerns coalesce around Heidegger's attempts to move towards a wholly other type of philosophy; in fact, one which no longer understands itself to be philosophy at (...) all. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of death, sacrifice, and mourning in Heidegger's thought in the 1930s. (shrink)

The following examines Hannah Arendt’s interpretations of Greek thought, specifically her phenomenological reading of Homer and Socrates as proto-phenomenological thinkers of objectivity, plurality, and logos. Drawing inspiration from these thinkers, Arendt finds the means of preserving and actualizing plurality as the existential truthfulness that emerges from the conflict in speaking and acting with others. She does this by contrasting how, after the trial and death of Socrates, thinking became professional philosophy and shifted its focus from the reciprocal interdependence of thinking, (...) speaking, and acting well in the polis and towards a reflection on truth, unity, and necessity that takes its start from an ontological order that is either prior to or beyond the world of appearances. Engaging with the literature, this article examines and assesses Arendt’s claims and focuses on the themes of plurality, conflict, and speaking, as set out in her interpretations of Homer and Socrates. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 3, pp 349 - 368 This article sets itself the task of explicating and assessing Heidegger’s hermeneutically expansive analyses of the ‘holy,’ ‘poetic expression,’ and ‘nature’ in his 1934/35 and 1944 Hölderlin lectures. The piece looks specifically at how Heidegger rearticulates poetic expression and nature through the fundamental attunement of ‘holy mourning’, which he finds in Hölderlin’s _Germanien_. I demonstrate how these two lecture courses, published as GA 4 and GA 39, offer us important insights (...) into the development of Heidegger’s reflections on the holy and poetic expression and in fact function as instructive bookends when it comes to understanding the role of the “last god” in Heidegger’s _Contributions to Philosophy_ and the talk of ‘the first’ and ‘the other beginning’ found therein. The article examines such issues as the poet as mediator, Heidegger’s non-dialectical employment of mediation and the limits of mediation, nature and the holy, the fundamental attunement of ‘holy mourning,’ the dangerousness of language, and the relation between humans and gods. (shrink)

This article pursues Heidegger’s protracted engagement with the question of silent origins. First, I explore the so-called transitional thinking grounded in the fundamental attunement of reticence as it is put forward in the Beiträge zur Philosophie. Second, I consider the complex matter of Heidegger’s reference to the intimate, yet distinct, roles of poetry and thinking when it comes to articulating a response to the attunement of reticence. I then move to explain what is at stake in Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin (...) on the nature of language, silence, and listening. This latter task involves analyzing Heidegger’s contention that Hölderlin’s poetic thought is both philosophically exemplary and futural. Finally, since I take Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin to be a critical appropriation, we must assess the coherence of his redeployment of Hölderlin’s thought models, especially, I will claim, his appropriation of the halfgods. (shrink)

The following examines the concept of time in Gadamer’s work, looking specifically at the role of artwork and festival as focal points of his temporal analysis. It is argued that the usual way of understanding Gadamer’s reflections on time as either “empty” or “fulfilled,” while accurate, need to be supplemented by a third species of time which is neither “full” nor “empty,” pointing instead to the underappreciated role of eternity in his thought. Eternity in this instance is not the other (...) or the outside of time, as one finds in various traditional metaphysical determinations. It is rather intended as the vast and unending time of the cosmos, hinted at in the experience of artwork and festival. (shrink)

_A hermeneutics of language after Auschwitz._.