This paper follows the implications of Gadamer’s hermeneutics after Truth and Method in which the forming of social life, and with it the idea of worldly understanding, receives greater attention. I argue that the emphasis in his later writings on worldly understanding draws less on the idea of the hermeneutic circle and problematic of the Geisteswissenschaften in which the concept of tradition is prominent than on the movement in language and the encounter with the other. As in the example of (...) translation, I argue that this movement has the character of passage from one place to another that holds within it an element of opacity. The development of this issue draws on a comparative analysis with the work of the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant. From this analysis I show how Gadamer’s hermeneutics addresses the issue of understanding across cultures and in mixed cultures. (shrink)

In Gadamer’s hermeneutics, interpretation is inseparable from the broader concern of making one’s way in life. In this book, James Risser builds on this insight about the juxtaposition of human living and the act of understanding by tracing hermeneutics back to the basic experience of philosophy as defined by Plato. For Risser, Plato provides resources for new directions in hermeneutics and new possibilities for "the life of understanding" and "the understanding of life." Risser places Gadamer (...) in dialogue with Plato, with the issue of memory as a conceptual focus. He develops themes pertaining to hermeneutics such as retrieval as a matter of convalescence, exile as a venture into the foreign, formation with respect to oneself and to life with others, the experience of language in hermeneutics, and the relationship between speaking and writing. (shrink)

In June 2019, Dr. James Risser was the invited scholar for the Canadian Hermeneutic Institute, held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Dr. Risser is a professor of philosophy at Seattle University and the Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University. He is also the editor of the journal Research in Phenomenology. He has held philosophy Chairs and is a prolific writer of books and articles in the areas of continental philosophy and philosophical hermeneutics. This paper (...) is the introduction to the three-day event of the CHI, and his beginning introduction to his papers. It is followed by three papers entitled When Words Fail: On the Power of Language and Human Experience; Speaking from Silence: On the Intimate Relation Between Silence and Speaking; and Hearing the Other: Communication as Shared Life. (shrink)

This volume of essays on the philosopher John Sallis assesses his wide ranging and genuinely original contribution to philosophy. Along with the response to the essays by Sallis, these essays indicate directions for the future of philosophy.

American Continental Philosophy is the first anthology to gather a representative selection of the most important and original thinkers from the continental tradition in the U.S. The essays reflect the diverse directions and methodologies that have emerged from this influential field. This state-of-the-art sampler showcases the richness and scope of American continental philosophy and will be of value to the entire philosophical community.

In the phenomenological tradition, which took root in the first part of the twentieth century, the issue of intersubjectivity became prominent as a way of characterizing social life. But as seen in the work of Edith Stein, for example, this philosophy of intersubjectivity gives prominence to the subject, and as such it leaves open not only the question of the basic character of social life, but also the hermeneutic problem of understanding the other. The focus of my remarks in (...) this paper will explore the way in which Gadamer moves beyond a philosophy of subjectivity in his effort to establish the conditions for communicative understanding. For Gadamer, communicative understanding only occurs through a genuine way of being with another. It requires not just being in relation to the other but a form of participation that amounts to an idea of shared life. Gadamer establishes the precise character of this shared life in relation to his critical encounter with Karl Löwith’s version of the I-Thou relation. (shrink)

This book is a focused study of the specific problem in aesthetics of literature's relation to truth. The authors's treatment of the problem is both expansive and highly nuanced, undoubtedly a result not only of the co-authoring of the book, which by all indications is a true collaborative effort, but also of the fact that the book is the product of a decade of work on the problem. The division of labor for the book, though, is obvious in the treatment (...) of different aspects of the problem. Lamarque is principally responsible for the first two parts of the book, while Olson takes primary responsibility for part three, "Literature and Truth.". (shrink)

This paper attempts to define Dennis J. Schmidt’s distinctive contribution to philosophy and to contemporary hermeneutics in particular under the heading of an ethical hermeneutics. The idea of an ethical hermeneutics is considered in relation to four aspects: 1) the element of practice as the constitutive element of ethical hermeneutics; 2) the force of practice: finitude; 3) the idiom as the place of finitude; 4) ethical hermeneutics and the domain of the common. The fourth aspect constitutes the critical engagement (...) with the idea of an ethical hermeneutics, arguing that the notion of the common, which is underdeveloped in Schmidt’s writings, serves as a practical “concept” that takes the place of the theoretical concept in an ethical hermeneutics. (shrink)

This paper assesses the philosophical project of Charles Scott, beginning with his first book, Boundaries in Mind, and including his most recent work on “Bor­dered Americans.” The interpretive focus for the assessment concentrates on what Scott early on characterizes as boundary awareness: the appearing of difference in appearance. In this context, it is argued that what is fundamentally at issue in Scott’s philosophy is a sense of freedom other than that which is associated with subjectivity and its presumed autonomy.

This paper explores the way in which the art of weaving, as it is initially presented in Plato’s Statesman, serves to configure both the fundamental character ofdiscourse and the limit experience of discourse for Plato. The problem that arises in relation to this configuration pertains to the possible unity of discourse (and with it the acquisition of knowledge). In relation to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and his reading of Plato, it is argued that the unity of discourse follows “the (...) arithmos structure of the logos” with its distinctive dialectical character. It is concluded that this character expresses the finitude of knowing in which oppositions remain in tension. (shrink)

The traditional reading of Plato’s criticism of the poets and painters in Book 10 of the Republic is that they merely imitate. In light of Plato’s own image-making, the critique of imitation requires a more careful examination, especially in regards to painting. This paper argues that it is insufficient to view Plato’s critique of image-making by the painter solely in terms of the image replication that does not consider the eidos. In view of the context of Plato’s argument within Book (...) 10 and elsewhere, other considerations, such as the ideas of measure and proportion, which pertain to the notion of the beautiful, are required for a complete understanding of the argument against the painter. In light of these further considerations I argue for a threefold distinction between mimesis as replication, mimesis as false resemblance, and mimesis as true resemblance. With respect to the third kind of mimesis, which directly pertains to Plato’s own image-making, one can see in Plato a different configuration of the relation between image and original portrayed in the image. (shrink)

This paper examines the issue of the unity of the critical philosophy in Kant’s Critique of Judgment through a careful consideration of the actual bridge that joins nature and freedom. Kant argues that this bridge is made under the demand for the furtherance of life, and is accordingly to be equated with the demand of freedom. This article specifically focuses on this demand that is, in effect, carried out by the principle of purposiveness. It is argued that this demand (...) is somewhat artificial since it does not fully take into account the real struggle between nature and freedom. (shrink)

This article is a response to comments made by Walter Brogan and Theodore George about my book, The Life of Understanding.

This article is an interpretive analysis of James Risser’s book The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics. I focus on the key elements of Risser’s notion of community and what I call his hermeneutics of the strange and foreign. The article pays particular attention to some of the most important themes in Risser’s book: aesthetics and the flash of beauty; language and the poetic word; the transmission of tradition; the movement of Ruinanz and the circulation of (...) life; weaving. Overall, I attempt to trace the nexus of Plato-Gadamer-Risser in Risser’s text in order to trace the emergence of a contemporary hermeneutics after Gadamer that is developed by Risser in this text. (shrink)

The purpose of this piece is to examine the contribution made to the philosophical study of hermeneutics by James Risser’s recently published book, The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics. The author argues that Risser’s emphasis on the relation of understanding to factical life places him among contemporaries, such as Donatella di Cesare and Günter Figal, who seek to advance hermeneutics beyond the context of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach. The author argues that Risser’s hermeneutics is distinguished by (...) his concern for the radical finitude at stake in the experience of tradition, language, and beauty. In view of this, the author broaches questions that bring into focus the proximity between Risser’s hermeneutics and Jacques Derrida’s project of deconstruction. (shrink)

Essays address the major themes of Pareyson’s hermeneutic philosophy in the context of his existentialist approach to personhood. What if the inexhaustible were the only mode of self-revelation of truth? The question of the inexhaustibility of truth, and its relation to being and interpretation, is the challenge posed by the philosophy of the prominent Italian thinker Luigi Pareyson (1918–1991). Art, the interpretation of truth, and the theory of being as the ontology of both inexhaustibility and freedom constitute the (...) main themes of Pareyson’s distinctive form of philosophical hermeneutics, which develops also on the basis of another fundamental concept, that of personhood understood in the radically existentialist sense of the human being. In Thinking the Inexhaustible, Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder bring together essays devoted to Pareyson’s hermeneutic philosophy by important international scholars, including well-known Italian thinkers Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo, who were both students of Pareyson. Pareyson’s philosophy of inexhaustibility unfolds in conversation with major figures in Western intellectual history—from Croce to Valéry, Dostoevsky, and Berdyaev; from Kant to Fichte, Hegel, and German romanticism; and from Pascal to Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marcel, Jaspers, and Heidegger. “This book introduces, in a way that has not been done before, the central ideas from Pareyson’s long philosophical career. It opens up pathways for further critical analysis and fills in a neglected history within the broader scope of continental philosophy.” — James Risser, editor of Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical analysis of Heidegger’s brief remarks in his “Letter on Humanism” in which he links ethics to ethos and ultimately to our relation to time and history. Central to this analysis is the phrase of Heraclitus, ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn, from which Heidegger claims that human living (ethos) is inseparable from the event of appropriation (Ereignis) which generates our historical destiny. Through further analysis that draws from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, it is shown (...) just how Heraclitus’s phrase can be interpreted differently and thus presents us with an idea of human destiny that serves to qualify Heidegger’s claim. (shrink)