As Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 150) explains, Dilthey like every other theorist of historical hermeneutics is haunted by the Hegelian ghost he tries to escape. For Dilthey, the problem is to prove the coherence and unity of history. He points to . . . . Continue Reading »
Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 144) neatly summarizes the dilemma of anti-Hegelian historicism, influenced as it was by the hermeneutical theories of Schleiermacher and later Dilthey. Here’s the problem: Historicism rejects the Hegelian notion . . . . Continue Reading »
Gadamer ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , p. 180 ) says, “We begin with this proposition: understanding means, first of all, understanding one another. Understanding is first of all having come to a mutual understanding. People understand one another immediately for the most part, or . . . . Continue Reading »
In warning his readers against bowing to idols in his Exhortation to Martyrdom ( Origen: An Exhortation to Martyrdom, Prayer, and Selected Works , p. 75 ), Origen finds that he has to address an issue in the philosophy of language. If “names are merely conventional and have no relations to . . . . Continue Reading »
Gadamer takes play and games as the starting point of his discussion of the ontology of art, and then asks what happens when we introduce an audience and make the game repeatable, when play becomes a play that can be played-for over and over again. Joel Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A . . . . Continue Reading »
Critiquing Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, Gadamer ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , pp. 166-7) says that his effort to reconstruct the setting of the original work in order to divine the creative act of the creator is impossible: “We may ask whether what we obtain [from . . . . Continue Reading »
Gadamer: “Nothing is so strange, and at the same time so demanding, as the written word. Not even meeting speakers of a foreign language can be compared with this strangeness, since the language of gesture and of sound is always in part immediately intelligible. The written word and what . . . . Continue Reading »
Wilhelm von Humboldt gives this profound explanation of the role of language in human life: “Just as the individual sound intervenes between object and man, the entire language does so between hum and nature acting upon him both externally and internally. He surrounds himself with an ambient . . . . Continue Reading »
Weinsheimer explains how Gadamer can think of interpretation as “play” while avoiding the bogeyman of an interpretive “free-for-all”: “In playing, we do not stand over against the game; we particular in it. A player who does not get fully involved in the game is called . . . . Continue Reading »
Joel Weinsheimer ( Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory ) neatly summarizes Gadamer’s argument that objectivism and subjectivism are the same thing: “Governing itself by rule, objectivity tries methodologically to eliminate bias, prejudice, and all the distortions that go by . . . . Continue Reading »
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