Proceedings of the First Conference of the International Society for Hermeneutics and Science.

In this wide-ranging historical introduction to philosophical hermeneutics, Jean Grondin discusses the major figures from Philo to Habermas, analyzes conflicts between various interpretive schools, and provides a persuasive critique of Gadamer's view of hermeneutic history, though in other ways Gadamer's Truth and Method serves as a model for Grondin's approach. Grondin begins with brief overviews of the pre-nineteenth-century thinkers Philo, Origen, Augustine, Luther, Flacius, Dannhauer, Chladenius, Meier, Rambach, Ast, and Schlegel. Next he provides more extensive treatments of such major (...) nineteenth-century figures as Schleiermacher, Böckh, Droysen, and Dilthey. There are full chapters devoted to Heidegger and Gadamer as well as shorter discussions of Betti, Habermas, and Derrida. Because he is the first to pay close attention to pre-Romantic figures, Grondin is able to show that the history of hermeneutics cannot be viewed as a gradual, steady progression in the direction of complete universalization. His book makes it clear that even in the early period, hermeneutic thinkers acknowledged a universal aspect in interpretation--that long before Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was philosophical and not merely practical. In revising and correcting the standard account, Grondin's book is not merely introductory but revisionary, suitable for beginners as well as advanced students in the field. (shrink)

Hermeneutics has had a pervasive influence on contemporary philosophy, social and cultural theory, literary criticism, and aesthetics. In this book one of Europe's foremost contemporary philosophers provides hermeneutics with a fresh relevance and a substantive account of its philosophical meaning for science, ethics, religion, and art. Vattimo argues for a reading of hermeneutics that radicalises it according to what the author calls its 'nihilistic vocation', a term referring to the interpretive character of truth and taken from Nietzsche's (...) statement that there are, in the modern period, no facts, only interpretations. Modernity, for Vattimo, is conceived as the advent of nihilism, and the central question of the book is to ask what it means to take this nihilistic vocation seriously. This involves not simply accepting the current status of hermeneutics, but evaluating why it appears when, and where, it does. (shrink)

This book challenges the standard view that modern hermeneutics begins with Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher, arguing instead that it is the dialectic of reflective and teleological reason in Kant’s Critique of Judgment that provides the actual proto-hermeneutic foundation. It is revolutionary in doing so by replacing interpretive truth claims by the more appropriate claim of rendering opaque contexts intelligible. Taking Gadamer’s comprehensive analysis of hermeneutics in Truth and Method (1960) as its point of departure, the book turns (...) to Kant’s Critiques, reviewing his major concepts as a coherent system in relation to his sensus communis. At the heart of the book is the interaction between reflective, bottom-up search and teleological, top-down interpretative projection as provided in Part II of the third Critique. This text contends that Kant’s broad definition of nature invites the liberation of the reflective-teleological judgment from its biological exemplifications and so permits us to establish its generalised status as a path-breaking, methodological tool. Kant’s dialectic of reflective search and meaning bestowing, stipulated teleology is asserted to anticipate a series of motifs commonly associated with hermeneutics. Figures covered include Dilthey, Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Vattimo, Nancy and Caputo. Their collective contributions to interpretation allow for a review of the evolution of hermeneutics from the perspective of the Kantian critique of the limitations of human cognition. The book is written for the informed, general reader, but will likewise appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel's achievement as part of a revolutionary modernization of ...

Arguably, the most promising and compelling route to demonstrating the significance of Hegel’s thought to contemporary philosophy has been the series of recent readings that construe Hegel as continuing and completing Kant’s Copernican turn. Paul Redding explicitly locates his interpretation within this program, seeing the hermeneutic dimension of Hegel’s thought as providing for the possibility of continuing the Kantian project. Kant’s Copernican turn can be loosely stated as the procedure of reflectively uncovering unexperienced conditions of experience that contribute to the (...) nature of experience in ways that require its further re-determination and re-description. What a hemeneutic take on this reflective procedure adds is that foremost among those conditions are contexts of intersubjective or dialogical relations—structures of recognition. While perhaps disappointing to anyone interested in the problem of textual interpretation, there is finally nothing more to Redding’s account of Hegel’s “hermeneutics” than the establishing of recognitive structures as forming the ultimate horizon of human experience. I take Redding’s relentless tracking of the problem of recognition to be one of his book’s virtues. (shrink)

OF THE many issues surrounding the new interest in hermeneutics, current debate has converged upon two.

I argue that clinical medicine can best be understood not as a purified science but as a hermeneutical enterprise: that is, as involved with the interpretation of texts. The literary critic reading a novel, the judge asked to apply a law, must arrive at a coherent reading of their respective texts. Similarly, the physician interprets the text of the ill person: clinical signs and symptoms are read to ferret out their meaning, the underlying disease. However, I suggest that the (...) class='Hi'>hermeneutics of medicine is rendered uniquely complex by its wide variety of textual forms. I discuss four in turn: the experiential text of illness as lived out by the patient; the narrative text constituted during history-taking; the physical text of the patient's body as objectively examined; the instrumental text constructed by diagnostic technologies. I further suggest that certain flaws in modern medicine arise from its refusal of a hermeneutic self-understanding. In seeking to escape all interpretive subjectivity, medicine has threatened to expunge its primary subject — the living, experiencing patient. (shrink)

Moving beyond the dialogical approaches found in much of contemporary hermeneutics, this book focuses instead on the diagnostic use of reflective judgment, not only to discern the differentiating features of the phenomena to be understood, but also to the various meaning contexts that can frame their interpretation. It assesses what such thinkers as Kant, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas and others can contribute to the problems of multicultural understanding, and reconceives hermeneutics as a critical inquiry into the appropriate (...) contextual conditions of understanding and interpretation. (shrink)

Jean Grondin’s starting point in his impressive book is what Hans-Georg Gadamer refers to as the universal claim of hermeneutics. Gadamer is better known for the limits his hermeneutics seems to place on universal claims. Against the reliance the Enlightenment placed on the insights of a reason common to humanity, Gadamer stresses the prejudiced and partial character of attempts to understand meaning. And against more contemporary attempts to ground Enlightenment conceptions in universal human competencies, he stresses the historicity (...) and finitude of human knowledge. Our attempts to understand the meaning of texts, conversations, historical events, and social actions and practices are conditioned by the horizon of our language, our own historical experiences, and our assumptions and expectations. Still, Gadamer ends his Truth and Method by stressing not only the linguistic character of understanding but the infinite capacity of all languages to find and express new dimensions of meaning. “Language,” he writes, “forestalls any objection to its jurisdiction. Its universality keeps pace with the universality of reason.”. (shrink)

Hermeneutics is one of those archaic and refractory, yet fashionable words which seem to crop up in so many places that they take on a power all their own. E. D. Hirsch has observed that the word has become “a rather vague, magical talisman.” For better or worse hermeneutics has entered into the theoretical controversies of literary criticism, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy—not only the theory of the humane disciplines but even the theory of the natural sciences.

The past 10 years have seen considerable developments in the use of narrative in medicine, primarily through the emergence of the so-called narrative medicine. In this article, I question narrative medicine’s self-understanding and contend that one of the most prominent issues is its lack of a clear epistemological framework. Drawing from Gadamer’s work on hermeneutics, I first show that narrative medicine is deeply linked with the hermeneutical field of knowledge. Then I try to identify which claims can be legitimately (...) expected from narrative medicine, and which ones cannot be. I scrutinize in particular whether narrative medicine can legitimately grasp the patient’s lived experience of his or her illness. In the last section of this article, I begin to explore the potential usefulness of this epistemological clarification. This analysis allows for a further understanding of what is really at stake with narrative medicine, and thus to identify when it may be convenient, and when it may not. Furthermore, this clarification opens up promising new possibilities of dialogue with critics of the field. I conclude that narrative medicine finds its proper place as a possible tool available to mediate dialogue, which is at the heart of the clinical encounter in medical practice. (shrink)

Rape culture is reportedly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. Culture, patriarchy, poverty and religion continue to sustain rape culture. The notions of the objectification of women’s bodies amongst the Shona people are causatives for rape culture within diverse cultural institutions. Africans reasonably uphold marriage with high esteem; unfortunately, the marriage institution is also susceptible to becoming a source of abuse, coercion, and is often used as a tool for controlling women. Some of the entrenched marital rituals embody diverse detrimental and contentious (...) practices, which deprive girls and women their autonomous rights, particularly their sexual and reproductive rights. This research article interrogates numerous aspects within the Shona indigenous religion and culture, which precipitate the construction of rape culture. The study uses African feminism as a theoretical framework. It utilises African feminist cultural hermeneutics to interrogate rape culture amongst the Shona people. The research study is qualitative with a conceptual analysis paradigm. It concludes by proposing the need for tapping into some life-giving and gender inclusive principles within the Shona indigenous religion and culture to be utilised as tools for eradicating rape culture. Contribution: Utilising the African feminist cultural hermeneutical framework, the article interrogated several factors precipitating rape culture amongst the Shona people. It foregrounded that women bear the brunt of burden of rape culture. It concludes by proposing the need for tapping into some positive Shona indigenous traditions as tools for curbing rape culture. (shrink)

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

This book analyzes the hermeneutics of place, raising questions about central issues such as textuality, dialogue, and play. It discusses the central figures in the development of hermeneutics and place, and surveys disciplines and areas in which a hermeneutic approach to place has been fruitful. It covers the range of philosophical hermeneutic theory, both within philosophy itself as well as from other disciplines. In doing so, the volume reflects the state of theorization on these issues, and also looks (...) forward to the implications and opportunities that exist. Philosophical hermeneutics has fundamentally altered philosophy’s approach to place. Issues such as how we dwell in place, how place is imagined, created, preserved, and lost, and how philosophy itself exists in place have become central. While there is much research applying hermeneutics to place, there is little which both reflects on that heritage and critically analyzes a hermeneutic approach to place. This book fills that void by offering a sustained analysis of the central elements, major figures, and disciplinary applications of hermeneutics and place. (shrink)

There are several branches of ethics. Clinical ethics, the one closest to medical decisionmaking, can be seen as a branch of medicine itself. In this view, clinical ethics is a unitary hermeneutics. Its rule is a guideline for unifying other theories of ethics in conjunction with the clinical context. Put another way, clinical ethics interprets the clinical situation in light of a balance of other values that, while guiding the decisionmaking process, also contributes to the very weighting of those (...) values. The case itself originates ideas, not only about which value ought to predominate in its resolution, but also provides the origin of clinical rules that can be used in other cases. These are interpretive rules. Some examples of these rules are presented as well. (shrink)

This text adresses the timely topic of relativism from the perspective of Gadamer's hermeneutics. This collection of essays explores several of the key issues in contemporary philosophy - the nature of truth, the model of conversation, and the possibility of an ethics in postmodern conditions - in the context of the work of Gadamer. Although centred on Gadamer and including the first English translation of one of his essays, the volume does not narrowly define or defend the approach of (...) philosophical hermeneutics; the contributors present a broad range of views, in some cases championing a Gadamerian perspective, in others challenging it. (shrink)