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69The Disruption of Health: Shaffer, Foucault and 'the Normal'Journal of Medical Humanities 20 (4): 231-245. 1999.In this article the aurhtor explores the intimate connection between the concepts of ‘health’ and ‘normality’ in the fields of medicine and mental health by discerning Foucauldian themes in Peter Shaffer’s critically acclaimed drama Equus. Shaffer’s scrutiny of the mental health field pinpoints the same issue as Foucault does in his many works on medicine and psychiatry, namely, that operating behind any concept of ‘health’ in these fields is nothing other than the notion of ‘normality.’ By lo…Read more
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55The Myth of the West Interrupted: Community and Cultural Difference in Nancy’s “Literary Communism”International Studies in Philosophy 35 (1): 49-63. 2003.The author submits that while Nancy's tendency to make Occidentalist remarks cannot be denied, it is antithetical to his own conception of community that may be forged through literature. Nancy's conception actually provides a basis to critique not only Occidentalism, but any view that blinds us to the significance of cultural differences. For Nancy genuine community can only be achieved in the exposure of the other as a singular individual marked by unique cultural, historical, and existential …Read more
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7Letter from the Editor (review)Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (2): 5-5. 2015.
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54Forgiveness, Freedom, and Human Finitude in Hegel’s The Spirit of Christianity and Its FateInternational Philosophical Quarterly 51 (1): 39-53. 2011.The purpose of this essay is to consider the significance that Hegel grants to religious love and, with it, forgiveness in his early The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate. Although Hegel characterizes religious love in this writing as a unity that transcends reason, his association of such love with forgiveness nevertheless sheds light on an important aspect of human finitude. In this, Hegel may be seen to identify forgiveness as a form of freedom elicited by limits that we encounter in practi…Read more
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43Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and PhilosophyState University of New York Press. 2010.Figal has long been recognized as one of the most insightful interpreters working in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics and its leading themes concerned with ancient Greek thought, art, language, and history. With this book, Figal presses this tradition of philosophical hermeneutics in new directions. In his effort to forge philosophical hermeneutics into a hermeneutical philosophy, Figal develops an original critique of the objectification of the world that emerges in modernity as the …Read more
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51The Worklessness of Literature: Blanchot, Hegel, and the Ambiguity of the Poetic WordPhilosophy Today 50 (Supplement): 39-47. 2006.Although there is much scholarship on Maurice Blanchot’s relationship to his contemporaries on the French intellectual scene, substantially less has been made of his debts to the German philosophical heritage in general, and to G. W. F. Hegel in particular. In this article, the author maintains that Blanchot’s association of literature with worklessness comprises a direct, if somewhat tacit, refusal of Hegel’s determination of art as a work of spirit. The author argues that Blanchot’s critical …Read more
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37Remarks on James Risser's "The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics"Philosophy Today 58 (1): 107-116. 2014.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 hermeneu…Read more
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40Günter Figal's hermeneuticsPhilosophy Compass 4 (6): 904-912. 2009.This article offers a survey of some main ideas in Günter Figal's hermeneutics as he presents them in his recent Gegenständlichkeit: Das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie [ Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy ]. Figal promises a new approach to the philosophical study of hermeneutics in this work that would advance beyond Gadamer, Heidegger, and others in significant respects. His project opens out from the belief that hermeneutical experience is guided by exteriority; such experience…Read more
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1Book Reviews: Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, edited by Bret W. Davis (review)Comparative and Continental Philosophy 2 (2): 291-300. 2010.
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71Thing, Object, LifeResearch in Phenomenology 42 (1): 18-34. 2012.Abstract The broad concern of this article is to contribute to discussions within hermeneutical philosophy that address the question of life as a form of correlation. More specifically, its purpose is to shed light on the character of life as correlation with reference to a basic aspect of this correlation: our living relation to things. To this end, the author focuses, first, on the later Heidegger's suggestion that our proper relation to things takes shape as an enactment guided by the release…Read more
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18Letter from the Editor (review)Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (1): 5-5. 2015.
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47From the Life of a People to the Death of Others: On Jean-Luc Nancy’s Unworking of Heidegger’s PoliticsInternational Studies in Philosophy 40 (1): 65-77. 2008.Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of the ‘inoperative community’ is one of the most original attempts in recent memory to develop a theory of the political that addresses contemporary concerns for difference and singularity. In this paper, I will argue that despite the deep rapprochement between Nancy and Heidegger, Nancy’s insistence upon the connection between community and singularity allows him to twist free from the more duplicitous features of his Heideggerian heritage. In contrast with Heidegge…Read more
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11Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2013. 2013.The appearance in English of Donatella Ester Di Cesare's Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz brings a distinctive development within the philosophical study of hermeneutics to an Anglophone readership.
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38What is the future of the past? Gadamer and Hegel on the Work of Art in the Age of its LiberationJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 40 (1): 4-20. 2009.Some more recent scholarship that challenges received wisdom about Gadamer not withstanding, it remains common to associate his hermeneutical approach to art and literature, along with his hermeneutics generally, with political and cultural conservatism. In this essay, however, the author argues that some of Gadamer’s significant, but underappreciated, later essays on Hegel’s aesthetics further support and nuance the rising recognition of Gadamer’s sensitivity to the discontinuities, dislocatio…Read more
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30SpecificationsEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 8 (1): 27-41. 2003.In the “Postscript” to his Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger suggests that one important aim of his investigation into the relation between truth and art is to subject to scrutiny Hegel’s famous thesis on the end of art. The purpose of my essay is to contribute to this project by reexamining aspects of Hegel’s discussion of art in the Phenomenology of Spirit that appear to subvert his own thesis. Hegel’s treatment of ancient Greek drama and, specifically, some of his remarks on comedy, not on…Read more
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20IntroductionResearch in Phenomenology 44 (1): 107-110. 2014.The essays that follow concern one of these contributions, Günter Figal’s Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010; English translation of Gegenständlichkeit: das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie, Mohr Siebeck 2006). These pieces are drawn from an “Author Meets Critics” session sponsored by the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics (NASPH) in conjunction with the 2012 meeting of SPEP. As conceived by the NASPH organizers, the principal purpose of the “Aut…Read more
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50Community in the idiom of crisis: Hegel on political life, tragedy, and the deadResearch in Phenomenology 32 (1): 123-138. 2002.One of the most pressing issues for contemporary continental philosophy turns on the determination of a concept of community that twists free from the dangerous tendency in the canon of Western thought to associate the perfection of political affiliation with complete unity, even totality and immanence. In this article the author suggests that in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel provides important resources for this project—not, of course, in his conception of that community indicated by the ab…Read more
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36Tragedies of Spirit: Tracing Finitude in Hegel's PhenomenologyState University of New York Press. 2006.In Tragedies of Spirit, Theodore D. George engages Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to explore the philosophical significance of tragedy in post-Kantian continental thought. George follows lines of inquiry originally developed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida, and takes as his point of departure the concern that Hegel’s speculative philosophy forms a summit of modernity that the present historical time is called to interrogate. Yet, George argues that Hegel’s larger speculative ambit…Read more
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53Nicolaus Cusanus and the PresentEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (1): 71-79. 2002.
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From Work to Play: Gadamer on the Affinity of Art, Truth, and BeautyInternationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik 10 107-122. 2011.In this essay, the author maintains that Gadamer’s affirmation of the relation among art, truth, and beauty is less a sign of conservatism or nostalgia than it is a key to his innovative and insightful examination of our experience of art. Gadamer’s approach to both the truth claim and the beauty of art flows from his association of the being of art with enactment (Vollzug). Yet, increasingly over the course of his writings, Gadamer appears to relinquishes talk of art in this sense as a ,work‘…Read more
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Objectivity and the Openness of Language: On Figal's Recent Contribution to the Debate between Hermeneutics and DeconstructionIn Friederike Rese, Michael Steinmann & David Espinet (eds.), Objektivität und Gegenstaendlichkeit, Mohr Siebeck. pp. 218-234. 2011.The author argues that Günter Figal sheds novel light on language in his recent Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy through a debate he appears to stage with the position Jacques Derrida develops in some of his early essays on deconstruction. Figal describes language as a form of showing and emphasizes the openness and flexibility of expression involved in determining significance. Yet, he rejects the idea he finds in Derrida that such flexibility should lead us to wholesale suspici…Read more
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25What is the Future of the Past? Gadamer and Hegel on Truth, Art and the Ruptures of TraditionJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 40 (1): 4-20. 2009.(2009). What is the Future of the Past? Gadamer and Hegel on Truth, Art and the Ruptures of Tradition. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 40, Tradition, Art & Sexuality, pp. 4-20.
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65Specifications: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Comedy of the End of ArtEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 8 (1): 27-41. 2003.In the “Postscript” to his Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger suggests that one important aim of his investigation into the relation between truth and art is to subject to scrutiny Hegel’s famous thesis on the end of art. The purpose of my essay is to contribute to this project by reexamining aspects of Hegel’s discussion of art in the Phenomenology of Spirit that appear to subvert his own thesis. Hegel’s treatment of ancient Greek drama and, specifically, some of his remarks on comedy, not on…Read more
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24Letter from the Editor (review)Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (1): 5-6. 2014.
College Station, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
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Hermeneutics |
Hans-Georg Gadamer |
Continental Ethics |
Continental Aesthetics |
Continental Philosophy of Language |
G. W. F. Hegel |
Aesthetics and Ethics |
PhilPapers Editorships
Hermeneutics |
Hans-Georg Gadamer |
Hermeneutics, Misc |