The Middle Voice in Gadamer's Hermeneutics


Book Description

Revised thesis (Ph. D.) - University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, 2002.




Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other


Book Description

Dealing extensively with Gadamer's later writings, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other shows neglected and widely misunderstood dimensions of Gadamer's hermeneutics: historicity, finitude, truth, the importance of the other, and the eminence of the poetic text.




The Inner Voice in Gadamer's Hermeneutics


Book Description

The inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics refers to the meaning that exceeds anything explicitly said. This explanation has been subsumed within metaphysical and theological parameters of interpretation with little regard for the implication of Gadamer’s turn to the living language for understanding the inner word. Through examining his phenomenology of the inner word, The Inner Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics reveals its musical (rhythmic and tonal) dimensions and how they function to harmonize disparate orientations in the middle voice, above all for Gadamer, those that underlie modes of cognition in both the humanities and the sciences—a visual and auditory ethos. However, understood as constituting the music of language discernible in the middle voice, the inner word is also suppressed or forgotten by the technological extension of sight—that is, print—and thus requires a turn of the inner ear or auditory disposition. Andrew Fuyarchuk assesses theories of language in evolutionary and cognitive science in light of Gadamer’s insights into the nature of thought, and he employs them to account for a dimension of language that is inscribed in the lingual minds of our species. When recalled by the inner ear, this dimension enables us to think such opposites together as we find in the humanities and sciences together. This thinking together is expressed in a double account of an object of inquiry, such as the one Fuyarchuk puts forward about the inner word in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.




Gadamer's Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation


Book Description

Gadamer's Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation covers the nature of dialogue and understanding in Hans-Georg Gadamer's lingually oriented hermeneutics and its relevance for contemporary philosophy. This timely collection of essays stresses the fundamental significance of the other for a further development of Heidegger's analytics of Dasein. By recognizing the priority of the other over oneself, Gadamerian hermeneutics founds a culture of dialogue sorely needed in our multi-cultural globalized community. The essays solicited for this volume are presented in three thematic blocks: "Hermeneutic Conversation," "Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, and Transcendence," "Hermeneutic Ethics, Education, and Politics." The volume proposes a dynamic understanding of hermeneutics as putting into practice the art of conversation.




Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer's Hermeneutics


Book Description

In this book, internationally recognized scholars in philosophical hermeneutics discuss various aspects of language and linguisticality. The translations of Hans-Georg Gadamer's two recent essays provoke a preliminary discussion on the philosopher's polemic claim in Truth and Method--"Being that can be understood is language." Topics addressed by the contributors include the relationship of rituals to tradition and the immemorial; the unity of the word; conversation; translation and conceptuality; and the interrelationship between the art of writing and linguisticality. This work is of critical importance to anyone interested in Gadamer's claims regarding the boundaries of language, the transition from the prelinguistic to linguistic realms, and the role of rituals in this transition.




Philosophical Hermeneutics


Book Description

'This volume presents carefully selected essays from Gadamer's Kleine Schriften. The seven essays comprising Part 1 contain Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutical reflection. Part 2 consists of six essays dealing with phenomenology, existential philosophy, and philosophical hermeneutics.




Hermeneutics at the Crossroads


Book Description

In this multi-faceted volume, Christian and other religiously committed theorists find themselves at an uneasy point in history -- between premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity -- where disciplines and methods, cultural and linguistic traditions, and religious commitments tangle and cross. Here, leading theorists explore the state of the art of the contemporary hermeneutical terrain. As they address the work of Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida, the essays collected in this wide-ranging work engage key themes in philosophical hermeneutics, hermeneutics and religion, hermeneutics and the other arts, hermeneutics and literature, and hermeneutics and ethics. Readers will find lively exchanges and reflections that meet the intellectual and philosophical challenges posed by hermeneutics at the crossroads. Contributors are Bruce Ellis Benson, Christina Bieber Lake, John D. Caputo, Eduardo J. Echeverria, Benne Faber, Norman Lillegard, Roger Lundin, Brian McCrea, James K. A. Smith, Michael VanderWeele, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.




Paul and the Meaning of Scripture


Book Description

One exciting area of study is Paul's use of the Old Testament. The apostle routinely appeals to Scripture to support his arguments and to persuade his readers. One gets the impression that Paul has a high respect for Scripture and that his knowledge of it is broad and comprehensive. And yet, there is something enigmatic about his use of the Old Testament at the same time--something elusive and even puzzling. His interpretations can appear strained, sometimes going beyond the text's original context. Is Paul a poor reader of Scripture? Is there genuine tension between Paul's interpretations and the original context of his quotations? In this riveting study, Matthew L. Halsted takes readers through Romans to explore these and related questions. In the end, he argues that such tension does exist and that the solution is not to ignore it or view it as a liability, but rather to preserve it by adopting a hermeneutic that can sufficiently account for it as an integral element for each and every act of interpretation. Following the insights of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), Halsted describes Paul's use of Scripture as dialogical re-authoring--a term that captures the dynamic relationship between the apostle and the Jewish texts that were so important to him.




E-Co-Affectivity


Book Description

Offers an interdisciplinary investigation of affectivity in various forms of life. E-Co-Affectivity is a philosophical investigation of affectivity in various forms of life: photosynthesis and growth in plants, touch and trauma in bird feathers, the ontogenesis of human life through the placenta, the bare interface of human skin, and the porous materiality of soil. Combining biology, phenomenology, Ancient Greek thought, new materialisms, environmental philosophy, and affect studies, Marjolein Oele thinks through the concrete, living places that show the receptive, responsive power of living beings to be affected and to affect. She focuses on these localized interfaces to explain how affectivity emerges in places that are always evolving, creative, porous, and fluid. Every interface is material, but is also “more” than its current materiality in cocreating place, time, and being. After extensively describing the effects of the milieu and community within which each example of affectivity takes place, in the final chapter Oele adds a prescriptive, ethical lens that formulates a new epoch beyond the Anthropocene, one that is sensitive to the larger ecological, communal concerns at stake. “This is a very welcome contribution to environmental philosophy. The strikingly original thesis is evident in the book’s title: what we call ‘ecology’ is a co-affectivity—the mutuality of affecting and being affected on the part of species, biological kingdoms, ecosystems, etc. Here, Marjolein Oele melds biology and ontology in new and creative ways, enriching both fields. Her book performs the very theme it explores: it stages a co-affective relation between philosophy and the life sciences.” — Michael Marder, author of Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life




Mediating Between the Humanities and the Sciences


Book Description

Gadamer is alleged to have conflated knowledge with private languages, which in turn entails adopting anti-thetical attitudes toward inter-subjectively verifiable facts produced by the natural sciences. As a result of this influence, a cultural and institutional divide has developed between the humanities and the sciences at the university. In reply to this assessment of Gadamer's work, I argue that his philosophical hermeneutics includes a dialectical interplay between two modes of cognition and their corresponding dispositions; the auditory and visual that are typically employed in the humanities and sciences. There is on this basis justification in his hermeneutics for scientific explanations of phenomena. These explanations are undertaken with respect to that in which the universality of hermeneutics is said to consist by Gadamer, the inner word. Contrary to the belief that this "word" belongs to either a metaphysical or mental realm, I draw upon phenomenology and argue that it refers to an inner voice between speakers in the middle voice and is thus amenable to cognitive scientific and evolutionary explanations. While those explanations are developed in relation to contemporary fields of research, e.g., S. Mithen, M. Donald, E. Thompson, the relevance of Gadamer's dialectic of standpoints to natural science is argued for on the grounds that scientists either presuppose the said dialectic, or require it in order to resolve conundrums generated by their own systems, e.g., E. Wilson, E. Slingerland, B. Bergen, H. Helmholtz. The method employed in the dissertation to defend Gadamer's relevance to the question of mediating between the two departments of learning is thereby enacted in the interest of clarifying what the inner word is and how it functions to weave harmony between opposing sides of a question. Gadamer's hermeneutics is thus not responsible for a "post-modern" opposition to the natural sciences. In fact, hermeneutics includes a way of thinking about phenomena that relates different ways of understanding to one another insofar as the speakers are attuned to the inner voice in language.