Peter Carravetta

Geography, the writing of the earth and the seas, is also inextricably human geography, a form of relating to our living-on-the-earth in which the physical and the cultural are not so easily disjoined, and where the politics of place plays a determining role. This paper examines how the travelers (explorers mostly) motivated their yearning for unknown lands (terra incognita), acted on that impulse, finally saw, recorded and reported objects and facts about the unknown as primary information that needed to be translated into usable knowledge to be circulated in various communities. This process required not just challenging established modes of knowing, but rethinking how humans theorize about the “world/s” that is/are built upon the earth. It required a paradigm shift that would have epochal consequences. The haunting conclusion is that perhaps humanity is, in some deep ontological sense, characterized by the language devised to explain these contingent encounters of roaming beings.

Peter Carravetta, The Elusive Hermes. Method, Discourse, Interpreting (Aurora (CO), Davies Group Publishing, 2012), 476 pp. The main ideas of this book take off from a critique of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, where the general theory of interpretation is predicated upon the notion of truth as dialogue but never examines the second word of the title, method, which is assumed to be the province of the natural sciences. How can method be ignored if it is the high point of scientific thinking, of epistemology in particular, the path to knowledge that marks the rise of Modernity? In other words, if it has been through science and rationalism that during the past five centuries the West has constructed a knowledge of itself, and if the (however partial) interpretation of our social reality requires we look at the way we understand ourselves historically, how could hermeneutics ignore a thorough study and re-thinking of how method itself evolved, how it related to theory (to ontology, to metaphysics), how it eschews the language of the tribe in search of a specialized, restricted, manipulable metalanguge? The book attempts a thorough critical history of the origin of method as crucial to philosophy (to the capacity to know anything at all) in Greek thought, traces its emergence as it distances itself first from myth, then from rhetoric, eventually from the Lifeworld, until it is crowned with Galilei and Descartes, and reaches its culmination with Husserl. But it also shows that method is intrinsically connected to an ever-present Theory which legitimates its “moves” and “use,” and that in the end it is not different ontologically and ontically from structured discourse, from “rhetoric,” it just negated the latter under the pressure and illusion of objectivity, the aspiration to value-free knowledge, and the myth of truth. Going against established histories of philosophy, author diminishes the relevance of the pre-Socratics in favor of Protagoras and the Sophists, who understood how language works and were more “realistically” attuned to what transpires in inter-personal exchanges. In this he goes beyond idealists, rationalists and some hermeneuticians in their never-ending love affair with Plato and his banning the sophists from the ideal perfect society. Theories are necessary and ever-present (even when unacknowledged), but do not have to be transcendent, atemporal or supratemporal, they are simply pragmatic visions that permit us to look at and understand a particular situation. At bottom, the key discipline is Discourse. Author also traces how, with its former surname, Rhetoric, is was slowly but relentlessly pruned of its aura and with the advent of the scientific and technological world-views, declassed, and considered no longer a structure or discipline to lead us to any sort of knowledge. Yet, contrary to this dominant tradition, it will be shown that this was a fatal mistake in the West, as it created unnecessary boundaries between different modes of reading and understanding reality. Science is as rhetorical as politics or literature. Author fights off all dualisms and proposes a hermeneutic trichotomy made up of Theory-Discourse-Method which is ever present in all interpretation but makes sense, and acquires validity, only in the actual application, in the contingencies of social history, in the inter-esse between participating parties in loco, in situation. The analyses are conducted by postulating a horizon in which four apexes are also always invoked, one made up of the dialectical pair Interpreter/Society (where Interpreter is an actually existing human), the other two consisting of the Interpreting Act or (conscious) process itself, and the fourth the necessary discourse (rhetoric) that permits intelligibility in the first place. Besides a re-evaluation of the cruciality of the sophists, author rereads C.S. Peirce as promoter of a little explored pragmatic-based speculative rhetoric, and of P. Ricouer as the philosopher who, through the decades that saw the triumph of materialism structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and analytical philosophy, returned to and refashioned a notion of hermeneutics rooted in existential phenomenology which places discourse and the interpersonal process of discoursing-with or –about at the heart of the process of interpretation, accepting the relativity/relationality and foundationlessness of Being, and the elusive nature of the message (or messenger: Hermes), yet still enabling us to determine, forever provisionally, the making of sense, whether in fact (history) or fiction (literature), and participate meaningfully in socio-political situations. Table of Contents Prologue 6 Acknowledgments 9 INTRODUCTION 1. Being and Method 11 2. Theory, Discourse, and Interpretation 15 PART ONE Method, Theory, and the Problem of Interpretation 1. On Methodological Relativity 20 2. On Theoretical Relativity 25 3. Terms, Field, and Figures of the Argument 31 4. Summary: The Elements of the Model 38 5. Further Considerations 41 5.1 Understanding and/is Interpretation 42 5.2 The Un-said and Judgment 39 5.3 Hermeneutics and Prejudgment 43 5.4 Endless Interpretation 45 5.5 About Critique 46 5.6 The Problem of Method 47 5.7 The Problem of Theory 49 5.8 The Interpreter and Language 52 PART TWO Method Through History Section I. The Struggle of Method vs Rhetoric from Antiquity to the Renaissance 1. Before Method: Myth, Philosophy, and Rhetoric 60 1.1 The “problem” of Myth 61 1.2 Between Geometry and Public Discourse 72 1.3 Loss of Wisdom, Love of Wisdom: Paradoxes of the Pre-Socratics 74 1.4 Language, Things, Mobility: Taking the Sophists Seriously 81 2. The Originary Dislocation: Method and Rhetoric in Plato 92 2.1 Gorgias 94 2.2 Protagoras 97 2.3 Phaedrus 102 2.4 Sophist 105 3. The Triumph of Method: Aristotle 116 3.1 Rhetoric 116 3.2 Topics 122 3.3 On Interpretation 125 3.4 Knowledge and Metaphysics 127 4. Developments from Cicero to Ramus: A synopsis 137 Section II. Supremacy of Method in the Early Modern Age 5. Conceptual Revolutions 144 5.1 Bacon and the New Scientific Method 144 5.2 Galilei and the Discourse of Experiment 155 6. The Descartes Enigma 159 6.1 Play and Meanings 159 6.2 Thought 166 6.3 Knowledge 170 6.4 Manifold Interpretations 173 6.5 Dark Lights of Reason 177 Section III. Reification and Crises of Method in Late Modernity 7. Introduction: The late XIX/early XX Century 181 8. Continental perspectives 184 8.1 Hegel: Method as Absolute Theory 184 8.2 Husserl: The Purity of Method in Ideas I 187 a. The things themselves 187 b. Thinking of something 189 c. Bracketing off the world (and Descartes) 190 d. Interdependencies 192 e. Method as metatheory 194 f. The groundlessness of method 196 g. The inventiveness of method 197 h. Consequences of phenomenological method 199 i. Further developments of phenomenology 200 9. Angloamerican Perspectives 9.1 Peirce 1: Rethinking Method: From Interpretant to Interpreter 203 9.2 Peirce 2: Knowledge, Discourse, Interpretation 211 9.3 Buchler: A Reasoned Approach to Methodological Thinking 215 10. General Remarks on the Crisis of Method 224 PART THREE Theory and Discourse 1. Rhetoric Between Method, Theory, and Interpretation 228 2. Perelman and the Rhetoric of Argument 237 3. Gadamer: Myth of Dialogue and Limits of Truth 3.1 The Field and the Subject 250 3.2 The Platonic anima 252 3.3 Interpretation 226 3.4 The Myth of Dialogue 268 3.5 Limits of Gadamer’s Dialogical Hermeneutics 271 4. The Challenge of the Rhetorical in Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics 4.1 The Problem and the Framework 262 4.2 Ricoeur’s Early Work on Interpretation and Language 263 4.3 The Plurality and Tasks of Interpretation 266 4.4 The Challenge from Linguistics and Semiotics 267 4.5 Towards the “Turn” in Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics. 1. Language 269 4.6 Towards the “Turn” in Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics. 2. Action 269 4.7 Metaphor and Discourse 271 4.8 The Rhetoric of History 273 CONCLUSIONS 1. The Model Redrawn 275 2. Of Interpreting 278 3. Of Hermes, symbolic and historical 279 4. Of the Elusive Hermes 282 NOTES 284 BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX OF TERMS INDEX OF NAMES

The central concern of these eight studies and essays is the understanding and critique of culture at the shifty boundaries between the Modem and the Postmodern epochs. The author contends that what needs to be addressed is the very abyss, the "spacetime" between the Modern and the Postmodern worldviews, as well as the tension between aesthetics and ethics, critical discourse and the creative arts, in an effort to rethink multireferential processes of signification. The keystone of the book is Carravetta's notion of Diaphoristics, a theory of interpretation as dialogue. Diaphora, or difference, refers to the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy and signifies the movement between asymmetrical or heterogeneous forms of discourse that have, both historically and speculatively, borne the transfer of meaning from one semantic/hermeneutic field to another. The author focuses on the necessary risk and duplicity of criticism and develops nonagonistic models based on figuration and rhetorical dynamics. In two other chapters, the author steps back to reassess, in terms of the diaphora, the diverging notions of Postmodernity by the continental philosophers Lyotard and Vattimo. The collection ends with an essay on the long-overdue conversation between Vico and Heidegger.

A study of the phenomenological poetics of Luciano Anceschi (1911-1995), especially his first book Autonomia ed eteronomia dell'arte (1936), how it valorized the critical contributions of the artists themselves (a pragmatic poetics), shifting the emphasis from Kantian aesthetics to the process of creation itself,. It explores the art "institutions" (similar to cultural topoi or memes) that arise and become dominant in late modern era, and which in turn trigger reactions by the various avant-gardes. Traces the emergence of the self-contained, autopoetic aspect of doing art, developing what might be called a process aesthetic.