Theodore George

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 “Author Meets Critics” session was to further discussion of the significance of Figal’s Objectivity for current research.

"Hans-Georg Gadamer is one of the most important philosophers of the post-1945 era. His name has become all but synonymous with the philosophical study of hermeneutics, the field concerned with theories of understanding and interpretation and laid out in his landmark book, Truth and Method. Influential not only within continental philosophy, Gadamer's thought has also made significant contributors to related fields such as religion, literary theory and education. The Gadamerian Mind is a major survey of the fundamental aspects of Gadamer's thought, with contributions from leading scholars of Gadamer and hermeneutics from around the world. Thirty-eight chapters are divided into six clear parts: Overviews Key Concepts Historical Influences Contemporary Encounters Beyond Philosophy Legacies and Questions. Although Gadamer's work addresses a remarkable range of topics, careful consideration is given throughout the volume to consistent concerns that orient his thought. Important in this respect is his relation to philosophers in the Western tradition, from Plato to Heidegger. An indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching Gadamer, hermeneutics and the history of twentieth-century philosophy, The Gadamerian Mind will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as religion, literature, political theory and education"--

In this essay, the author argues that Dennis Schmidt’s considerations of ethical life, when taken together, comprise a prescient and distinctive response to Heidegger’s call to pursue an ‘original ethics.’ In this, Schmidt disavows discourses within the discipline of ethics that seek to establish an ethical theory or position, arguing instead that the demands of ethical life require us to focus on the incalculable singularity of the factical situations in which we find ourselves. The author suggests that Schmidt’s contributions to such an original ethical turns on Schmidt’s claims that the context of ethical life is fraught because bound up with radical finitude—though, for that very reason, also tender because marked by the need to care for one another in our vulnerability and fragileness.

Significant proponents of both postmodern and realistic hermeneutics suggest that our efforts to understand are better when they involve a plurality of interpretative perspectives. The author of this essay argues, however, that a realist approach can provide a more persuasive reason for this orientation toward plurality. Postmodern approaches in hermeneutics suggest that we should pursue a plurality of interpretations to help us break free from the influence of reductive interpretations inherited from the past. Yet, this normative orientation runs the risk of a proliferation of interpretations that leaves us in hermeneutical isolation from one another. A realistic hermeneutics, by contrast, suggests that we should pursue a plurality of interpretations because the matters of mutual concern to us are, in and of their own reality, plural. This realistic reason to pursue a plurality of interpretations does not silo us from one another but, on the contrary, reminds us of the need for conversation that allows us to address our shared world of matters of mutual concern.

Hermeneutics has a long tradition in the history of philosophy. It carries the task of Hermes to bring God’s message to humans and translate it without betraying it. This special issue of the journal Critical Hermeneutics proposes a double research track: veritative hermeneutics and hermeneutic realism. This double track testifies to the original purpose of hermeneutics to formulate fundamental philosophical questions in light of human historical experience. Opposed to relativism, veritative hermeneutics and hermeneutic realism focus on truth, objectivity, the structure of reality, normativity, and meaning. The issue publishes contributions of this track’s pioneers (Gaspare Mura – veritative hermeneutics, Günter Figal, and Anton Friedrich Koch – hermeneutic realism) as well as authors that explore this track from various perspectives: ethics, personalism, normativity, testimony, Biblical hermeneutics and Jewish thought, religious language, meaning. In this introduction, we will first present the authors working on veritative hermeneutics, then those working on hermeneutic realism....

Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is important to phenomenology for a number of reasons. One chief reason is that Gadamer describes his philosophical hermeneutics as an attempt to advance beyond the early Heidegger’s introduction of a “hermeneutics of facticity” that would break from the transcendental idealism of Husserl’s phenomenology. This chapter argues that Gadamer attempts to clarify his advance beyond Heidegger’s hermeneutical turn in phenomenology, at least in part, in reference to Hegel’s philosophy. While Gadamer remains critical of German Idealism generally and Hegel’s notion of “absolute” spirit in particular, Gadamer nevertheless embraces Hegel’s approach to “objective” spirit in order to elucidate historical and linguistic conditions of facticity that the early Heidegger appears to discount.

Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics cannot fully be understood without the contour his project receives from his relation to Kant's third Critique of Judgmentand Hegel's absolute idealism. Although Gadamer's deepest ties are to Heidegger, his thought also remains shaped greatly by the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, as well as figures and themes in the classical age of German philosophy from Kant to Hegel. This chapter discusses two crucial points of Gadamer's approach to German idealism. The first is the debt he owes to Kant's third Critique for his own elucidation of the hermeneutical experience of truth, and, second is the debt that he owes to aspects of Hegel's absolute idealism for his own notion of hermeneutical self‐knowledge. The chapter shows that Gadamer, in his approach to both Kant's third Critique and Hegel's absolute idealism, focuses on themes that allow him to emphasize the forms of finitude he believes guide hermeneutical experience.

Some critics charge that Gadamer’s approach to our experience of art remains mired in conservatism because he believes our experience of artworks depends on tradition. In this essay, I argue that this charge fails to address the full scope of Gadamer’s considerations of our experience of art. This becomes clear with an emendation that Gadamer appears to make to his Truth and Method account of artistic imitation, or, mimesis, in his later essay “Art and Imitation.” Whereas Gadamer’s approach to mimesis in Truth and Method provides testimony to the significance of tradition for our experience of artworks, his account in “Art and Imitation” make the supplementary proposal that our experience of artworks testify to a more fundamental and encompassing experience of what he shall simply refer to as ‘order.’ Gadamer thereby suggests that our experience of artworks concerns not only foremost or exclusively our belonging to a tradition but, more originally, our possibilities for belonging as such.

This dissertation provides a careful interpretation of Hegel's conception of political community in the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is often accepted by commentators that for Hegel in this text the highest achievements of community life are to be associated with the realization of 'absolute spirit' and 'the concept.' The author of this dissertation, however, develops a conception of political community based not upon this view, but instead upon a number of crucial, if somewhat oblique, passages within the Phenomenology dedicated to the poetic genera of tragic drama. In light of these remarks, Hegel, perhaps contrary to his own thematic position, suggests that tragic drama can serve as a schema or model for the accomplishment of political community itself. The determination of community exhibited in this view entails a sense of political togetherness which, though a form of unity, nevertheless works to embrace forms of irreconcilable conflict, otherness and difference which lie at the heart of all political affiliation. ;Although the dissertation focuses ultimately on the conception of tragic community elaborated in Chapter VII of the Phenomenology, "Religion in the Form of Art," the author interprets this conception of tragic political unity in conjunction with two other crucial discussions in the text imbued with allusions to tragedy: one found in Hegel's oblique reference to the Antigone of Sophocles in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology on Sittlichkeit, or ethical life, the other indicated by Hegel's reference to 'reversal' in his discussion of mastery and servitude in Chapter IV. In contrast with the Philosophy of Right where Hegel's account is concerned with the establishment of right in the institutions and practices of the modern state, the form of community achieved in tragic drama in the Phenomenology is constituted by means of a communally shared, aesthetic experience. In this dissertation, the author turns not only to the Phenomenology , but relies upon the Philosophy of Right, Lectures on Aesthetics , and interpreters of Hegel in the continental tradition, such as Heidegger, Gadamer and Derrida

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‘ in favor of an emphasis on the kinship between art and the phenomenon of play. In light of this shift, it is argued that Gadamer’s conception of the truth claim and beauty of art may best be understood not as properties of a product or artifact, of something already enacted and thus complete in itself, but, instead, as nothing other than the very enacting of that freedom which he finds at the heart of human play.

The concern of the present inquiry is whether, and, if so, how, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of hermeneutical understanding can help us grasp the character of our ethical responsibility, and, indeed, a sense of responsibility that remains answerable to the plurality of our always singular and contingent ethical experiences. The focus of this essay, however, is to shed novel light on the responsibility at stake in understanding—or, as this may be referred to more simply, the responsibility to understand—on the motif of Gadamer’s call for us to “elevate” ourselves “to humanity” through “the aptitude [Fähigkeit] for conversation.” This identification of the responsibility to understand with our elevation of ourselves to our humanity appears, initially at least, to stand in opposition to Heidegger’s celebrated (some would say notorious) criticism of humanism in his “Letter on Humanism” and elsewhere. Yet, as we shall see, Gadamer’s call for us to elevate ourselves to our humanity in fact may be grasped as an ‘extreme’ form of humanism that answers to criticisms of the humanist tradition prevalent since they were first raised by Heidegger in his “Letter.”

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 suspicion of the capacity of language to fix significance. Whereas Derrida concludes that all attempts to fix significance through supplementation of our expressions can only end in the need for further supplementation, Figal stresses the dialectical mien of language that allows supplementation to yield genuinely determinate significances.

In this essay, the author argues that Gadamer's approach to world literature contributes to the call for us mutually to discover our solidarities with those from different traditions, and, thus also, different linguistic traditions. He holds that the discovery of global solidarities is urgent because current prospects to address the world's political, social and economic challenges have been put in jeopardy by the increasingly ubiquitous use of calculative rationality to manage human relations. Gadamer's concern for us to discover solidarities, however, concerns not first that we ally ourselves with some political identity, ideal, or cause, but, rather, that we allow ourselves to become visible to one another in our respective exteriority as finite, free beings. In this context, the author seeks to show that world literature may contribute to the discovery of solidarities by bringing us into such visibility on a global scale.