Andrzej Wiercinski

This book confronts the challenges that hermeneutics brings to ethics and education by thematizing the critical influence which ethics and contemporary educational theory and practice have on the self-understanding of philosophical hermeneutics. In the hermeneutic spirit of commitment to cultivating lifelong habits of critical thinking, moral reflection, and articulate expression, the book presents many voices that illuminate a rich cultural diversity with the profound hope of nurturing the full-flourishing of human beings. The hermeneutics of education calls for diverse ways of thinking about education, which deeply cares for the common good of individuals, communities, and nations. This diversity promotes a genuine interest in different approaches to the event (Ereignis) of education. (Series: International Studies in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology - Vol. 8) [Subject: Hermeneutics, Ethics, Education]

In the academic year 1920-1921 at the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger gave a series of extraordinary lectures on the phenomenological significance of the religious thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine. The publication of these lectures in 1995 settled a long disputed question, the decisive role played by Christian theology in the development of Heidegger’s philosophy. The lectures present a special challenge to readers of Heidegger and theology alike. Experimenting with language and drawing upon a wide range of now obscure authors, Heidegger is finding his way to Being and Time through the labyrinth of his Catholic past and his increasing fascination with Protestant theology. A Companion to Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religious Life is written by an international team of Heidegger specialists

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a careful description of the progressive unfolding of Spirit. Its dialectic is the education of consciousness. There are three stages of unhappy consciousness: external beyond, changing individual, and achieved reconciliation. Being aware of its own mutability, the self yearns for reconciliation, which can only come from the external beyond, from the unchanging. The quest of unhappy consciousness for reconciliation is characterized by the three stages of devotion, sacramental desire and labour, and self-mortification. The self, constituted by what is other, is never able to achieve lasting satisfaction; it desires the unity of self-consciousness. Through the experience of itself, the self comes to a clearer self-awareness and transgresses its own limits.

Hermeneutics promotes an awareness of the interpretive character of the world. With regard to the difficult and complex relationship between philosophy and theology,hermeneutics calls for critical rethinking of the Heideggerian postulate to exclude theology from philosophy on the grounds of the autonomy of philosophy, and to exclude philosophy from theology on Barthian revelational positivist grounds.Heidegger‟s philosophy has a long history of being interpreted as an invitation to theology to think about God and religion in a new, non metaphysical way. Reexamining the question of the meaning of Being,Heidegger inspired a search for new paths of thinking God outside the established onto-theological tradition.I will argue that both exclusions—philosophy from theology, theology from philosophy—are hermeneutically untenable