Theodore George

This volume is comprised of contributions from internationally respected scholars dedicated to the theme of "The Future of Hermeneutics." These contributions are gathered from research originally presented at the annual International Hermeneutics Symposium in 2023 and 2024. The topic means to draw attention not only to the relevance of research in hermeneutics for our future, but also current developments in hermeneutics that will shape research in the field to come. Hermeneutics originally taught us how to approach texts, authors, and the act of reading itself. Yet today, when experience, existence, language, meaning, and interpretation are challenged by shifting cultural, technological, and ethical contexts, hermeneutics calls for renewal, while staying true to its original calling to be an open and receptive practice of understanding. By attending to the dialogical nature of texts, the fragility of truth, the material circumstances of nature and culture, and the responsibilities of interpretation, hermeneutics offers new perspectives for engaging with the world, aiming to preserve the bonds between word and world, between experience, interpretation, and life. This volume, then, represents research completed in connection with the International Hermeneutics Symposium. The contributions to the symposium will continue to be published, even though from this year onwards in a different, updated form, no longer as a yearbook, but as a volume in a new series: Post-Kantian European Philosophy (P-KEP).

While scholars have long recognized the significance of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1930 “Practical Knowledge”, the essay has remained unavailable to an Anglophone readership until now. Gadamer’s “Practical Knowledge” represents his early views on a theme that will later prove decisive for his philosophical hermeneutics, namely, the ancient Greek concept of phronesis. In this translators’ introduction, we first outline some key points from Gadamer’s argument before turning, then, to some suggestions about the importance of Gadamer’s essay for understanding his development, his relationship to Heidegger and ancient Greek thought and, finally, his contribution to ethics.

The legacy of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics includes not only several positions that continue to influence current debate in the field. He also leaves the legacy of an important philosophical tension based in the way he conceives of understanding. On the one hand, Gadamer maintains that genuine understanding remains true to matters themselves. On the other hand, though, he acknowledges that understanding is always mediated by language, and, thereby, meaning inherited from tradition. After a brief consideration of this tension in Gadamer’s thought, the author argues that this tension leads to a divide between two post-Gadamerian approaches in hermeneutics, one postmodern and the other new-realist. Postmodern hermeneutics is shown to give priority to the role played by language in understanding while new-realist hermeneutics is shown to stress the focus of understanding on the matters themselves. The author concludes with a brief consideration of the normative implications of this legacy.

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.

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....

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.

"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"--

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.

Examines the role that poets and the poetic word play in the formation of philosophical thinking in the modern German tradition. Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets’ contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition. Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses.

What is the significance of hermeneutics at the intersections of ethics, politics and the arts and humanities? In this book, George - Discusses how hermeneutics offers ways to develop an ethics - Makes the case for the relevance of contemporary hermeneutics for current scholarly discussions of responsibility within continental European philosophy - Contributes a new, ethically inflected approach to current debate within post-Gadamerian hermeneutics - Extends his analysis to the practice of living and covers animals, art, literature and translation Few topics have received broader attention within contemporary philosophy than that of responsibility. Theodore George makes a novel case for a distinctive sense of responsibility at stake in the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation. George argues for the significance of this hermeneutical responsibility in the context of our relations with things, animals and others, as well as political solidarity and the formation of solidarities through the arts, literature and translation.

In this paper, the author turns to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to examine the experience of grieving. Specifically, the author argues that grieving may be grasped as a limit situation of memory. This approach suggests that grieving cannot be adequately captured by a stage model theory but, instead, poses an infinite task that is fraught with difficulty and ethical demands. The author develops this approach in reference not only to Hans-Georg Gadamer but recent research by Nancy Moules and Kate Beamer.

Taken in general terms, “hermeneutics” refers to the study of understanding and interpretation, and, traditionally, this study focuses on considerations of the art, method, and foundations of research in the arts and humanities. The study of hermeneutics has been developed and applied in a number of areas of scholarly inquiry, such as biblical exegesis, literary studies, legal studies, and the medical humanities. In the context of post-war Continental European thought, however, hermeneutics is brought into a novel philosophical context and, with this, comes to designate a philosophical movement – or, at least, a number of related philosophers and themes – concerned with the scope and limits of phenomenology, the character of human existence, the relation of the natural sciences and humanities, as well as a range of interrelated matters in the philosophy of history, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of art and aesthetics, practical philosophy, as well as in epistemology and the theory of meaning.

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.

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.”

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.