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2Stabilization of long-term potentiation depends on reorganization of the dendritic spine actin cytoskeleton. The present study tested whether this involves activity-driven effects on the actin-regulatory protein cortactin, and whether such effects are disturbed in the Fmr1 knock-out model of fragile X syndrome, in which stabilization of both actin filaments and LTP is impaired. LTP induced by theta burst stimulation in hippocampal slices from wild-type mice was associated with rapid, broadly dis…Read more
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8The Event of Meaning in Gadamer's HermeneuticsRoutledge. 2024.This book presents the first detailed treatment of Gadamer’s account of the nature of meaning. It argues both that this account is philosophically valuable in its own right and that understanding it sheds new light on his wider hermeneutical project. Whereas philosophers have typically thought of meanings as belonging to a special class of objects, the central claim of Gadamer’s view is that meanings are events. Instead of a pre-existing content that we must unearth through our interpretive effo…Read more
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Gadamer's Aspectival RealismErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7 985-1014. 2020.Gadamer claims that human beings are capable of understanding only ‘aspects’ of reality, yet he also holds that, through these aspects, we understand reality itself. In this sense he is an ‘aspectival realist.’ This paper considers two attempts to explain Gadamer’s aspectival realism: the ‘schematization’ reading defended by Charles Taylor, and the ‘holist’ reading of Brice Wachterhauser. I criticize these views on two fronts: that they are at odds with Gadamer’s texts, and that they fail to rec…Read more
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2694Gadamer's Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2022.Gadamer's Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary offers a fresh look at Gadamer's magnum opus, Truth and Method, which was first published in German in 1960, translated into English in 1975, and is widely recognized as a ground-breaking text of philosophical hermeneutics. The volume features essays from fourteen scholars--both established and rising stars--each of which cover a portion of Truth and Method following the order of the text itself. The result is a robust, historically and themati…Read more
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73What Does Davidson Reject When He Rejects Conceptual Schemes?Acta Analytica 33 (4): 463-481. 2018.According to a common line of criticism, Donald Davidson’s argument in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” is invalid because it moves illicitly from the relatively weak thesis that conceptual schemes cannot be incommensurable to the stronger thesis that the idea of a conceptual scheme itself is incoherent. I argue in this paper that such objections fail because they misunderstand the position that Davidson’s argument is intended to rule out. According to the “scheme-content dualism” David…Read more
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13Merold Westphal: In praise of heteronomy: making room for revelation: Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2017, xxvi and 241 pp, $30 (review)International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 83 (3): 309-314. 2018.
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40Meaning for Radical Contextualists: Travis and Gadamer on Why Words MatterPhilosophical Investigations 41 (1): 22-41. 2017.Charles Travis and Hans-Georg Gadamer both affirm radical contextualism, the view that natural language is ineliminably context-sensitive. However, they offer different accounts of the role linguistic meaning plays in determining the contents of utterances. I discuss the differences between Travis's and Gadamer's views of meaning and offer an argument in favour of the latter. I argue that Travis's view assumes a principled distinction between literal and figurative speech that is at odds with hi…Read more
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91Radical Interpretation and the Problem of AsymmetryInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (4): 473-488. 2016.Davidson holds that thinkers cannot employ radically different conceptual schemes, but he does not deny the fact that small-scale conceptual divergences are possible. He defends the former claim against Quine by appealing to interpretivism, the idea that ascriptions of intensional states to a speaker do no more than systematically record facts about the speaker’s behavior. From interpretivism it follows that it is theoretically irrelevant which set of concepts an interpreter uses to state her th…Read more
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15Review of Jerome Veith, Gadamer and the Transmission of History (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2015. 2015.
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21The Intentional Priority of the QuestionPhilosophy Today 58 (1): 67-83. 2014.In Truth and Method Gadamer makes the curious claim that “we cannot have experiences without asking questions.” At first blush, at least, this appears to be patently false. We have experiences all the time without asking ourselves anything. In this paper I offer an alternative reading of Gadamer’s claim that does not fall prey to this objection, one that centers around his analysis of the question as a structure that can be implicitly present in experience even when no explicit questioning occur…Read more
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72Does Conversation Need Shared Language? Davidson and Gadamer on Communicative UnderstandingSouthern Journal of Philosophy 52 (3): 359-381. 2014.In a rare discussion of Gadamer's work, Davidson takes issue with Gadamer's claim that successful communication requires that interlocutors share a common language. While he is right to see a difference between his own views and Gadamer's on this point, Davidson appears to have misunderstood what motivates Gadamer's position, conflating it with that of his more familiar conventionalist interlocutors. This paper articulates Gadamer's view of the role of language in communicative understanding as …Read more
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51Limit and Unlimitedness in the Philebus: An Argument for the Gadamerian ReadingApeiron 46 (1): 48-62. 2013.In ‘The Limits of Being in the Philebus’, Russell Dancy argues that the Philebus is incoherent because a central concept - that of the apeiron - functions entirely differently in the discussions of the ‘Heavenly Tradition’ and the ‘Fourfold Division’. I argue that a phenomenological reading of the type developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, one according to which ‘limit’ and ‘unlimitedness’ describe the way entities appear when approached with certain concepts, shows Dancy’s worry of incoherence to be…Read more
Greg Lynch
North Central College
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North Central CollegeDepartment of Philosophy, North Central CollegeAssociate Professor
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Hans-Georg Gadamer |
Hermeneutics |
Philosophy of Language |
Continental Philosophy |
Donald Davidson |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
1 more
Philosophy of Language |
20th Century Philosophy |
Donald Davidson |
Hans-Georg Gadamer |
Continental Philosophy |
Hermeneutics |