The Carolingian empire in western Europe has long been defined by its military expansion and Christian renewal. Carolingian historical narratives portrayed their victories as divine gifts and so encouraged soldiers and commanders to interpret their actions within a theological hermeneutic. Previous scholars have seen this hermeneutic as justifying war. This paper shall argue instead that these narratives reflected and reinforced the hermeneutic with which soldiers interpreted their campaigns and the military spirituality practised as a result. It shall examine how various (...) histories interpreted military events and how these interpretations related to their audiences’ spirituality and military experience. (shrink)

The official Afrikaans Bible translations, published in 1933/1953, 1983 and 2020, influenced Reformed theology, sociopolitical perceptions and the role of the church in society. These issues bled through in the translations via the hermeneutical scope of the different eras. This study focuses on the influence of the hermeneutic foundations of the translators on the content, style and linguistic choices in these translations. The differences between the translations are quite obvious to the reader and a reflection of the fact that different (...) translation strategies were followed. There were vastly different sociopolitical and religious contexts prevailing during the different translation projects. Not only did the sociohistorical setting in South Africa undergo dramatic changes, but internationally there were historic events, such as the two World Wars, the rise and fall of communism, globalisation and the rapid development of technology and the Internet. No official hermeneutic strategies were documented or self-reflectively employed by the translators of the Afrikaans Bibles and therefore this study will approach the hermeneutics of the translations from a descriptive point of view. Sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts together with developments in theological reflection will provide the background for understanding the prevailing hermeneutics of the translations.Contribution: A new Afrikaans Bible was released in 2020, and a need arose to put the Afrikaans translations in applicable hermeneutical contexts. This discussion provides insights into the hermeneutical backgrounds of the three official Afrikaans translations. This contributes to the knowledge base of Afrikaans Bible translations and provides new insights into the hermeneutics of these translations. (shrink)

This essay uses the global impact of the Coronavirus as a heuristic semiotic for exploring the future of the church. Unlike the pandemic of 1918, which left few dents on the world's economic, social, and cultural systems, almost all the nations of the world have passed laws and implemented procedures that are only comparable to world wars in their impact on entire populations. Nations are acting in unison, but not in unity. This post-COVID, post-Corona world is the 'time that is (...) given' to the church. But it will not be a post-pandemic world. We may become COVID-proof, but we will never be pandemic-proof. There is no pre-COVID reset. There is only risk assessment from natural extinction risks to existential dangers of our own creation that are catching up to us. Disruption is the new status that is never quo; stability is the new abnormality; global cataclysm is the ever-present peril. The only way to prepare for a future of constant 'the end of the world as we know it?' moments is by developing a high Contextual Quotient, and deepening our Contextual Intelligence so we can choose 'the next right thing' in a world of volcanic volatility. CONTRIBUTION: This essay frames the semiotics of a missional ecclesiology in the COVIDian wake from the hermeneutics of blessings not curses. What virtues might we expect to come out of a virus that is fast-forwarding the future, virtues that will shape the contours of Christianity. What if the pandemic is a shock treatment that is putting the world, and the church, back in a new and better equilibrium? What if there are goldmines on the other side of the landmines and minefields? (shrink)

English Editorial of the special Issue on Philosophical Theories of War: Contemporary Challenges and Discussions giving an overview of the latest state of the debate.

An alternative to objectifying approaches to understanding Post-traumatic Stress Disorder grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology is presented. Nurses who provided care for soldiers injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and sixty-seven wounded male servicemen in the rehabilitation phase of their recovery were interviewed. PTSD is the one major psychiatric diagnosis where social causation is established, yet PTSD is predominantly viewed in terms of the usual neuro-physiological causal models with traumatic social events viewed as pathogens with dose related effects. Biologic models (...) of causation are applied reductively to both predisposing personal vulnerabilities and strengths that prevent PTSD, such as resiliency. However, framing PTSD as an objective disease state separates it from narrative historical details of the trauma. Personal stories and cultural meanings of the traumatic events are seen as epiphenomenal, unrelated to the understanding of, and ultimately, the therapeutic treatment of PTSD. Most wounded service members described classic symptoms of PTSD: flashbacks, insomnia, anxiety etc. All experienced disturbance in their sense of time and place. Rather than see the occurrence of these symptoms as decontextualized mechanistic reverberations of war, we consider how these symptoms meaningfully reflect actual war experiences and sense of displacement experienced by service members. (shrink)

Is something like a true "philosophy of war"—understood as a coherent system of ideas, or a clearly articulated theoretical posture adequate to fully addressing the enduring chal-lenges of war on a properly philosophical register—at all possible? What follows is an attempt to outline, in four problems, the parameters of any future critique of a philosophy of war: the problem of categories, the problem of representation, the problem of violence, and finally the problem of peace. It is argued that within each (...) horizon delimited by these four problems philosophy encounters a potential limit, one that raises fundamental doubts regarding the cogency of any philosophy of war considered as a systematic enterprise. (shrink)

Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall. Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy (...) conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings--in technology, empire, and industrialization--are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala's well-known work on the weakening of religion, _Hermeneutic Communism_ realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to situate the problem of the conflict of interpretations in Paul Ricœur by placing it in the context of Ricœur’s anthropological reflections on the questions of fallibility and evil. The article invokes the distinction between fallibility and evil and analyses the symbolic language of evil as a reason for the hermeneutic turn of Ricœur’s thought. The implications of this topic for the philosophical analyses of language and consciousness are then put in relief. The article (...) explains the inner workings of the logic of the conflict of interpretations, showing its perspectival trait, and claims that this notion remains pertinent given that its method can today be applied to conflicts of interpretations other than those Ricœur dealt with. (shrink)

The text reconstructs the protocol of 'victory' as part of the interruption of enmity and establishment of temporary peace. Different understandings of the enemy and enmity imply that victory in war and cessation of conflict can essentially determine the way war is conducted, and that they follow rules of war. Victory is supposed to be a crucial moment that characterizes the ethics of war. Particular testimonies and thematizations of victory in the Orthodox Christian tradition can provide an intro-duction into a (...) potential ethics of war that could ensure a new relationship towards the enemy and killing the enemy. (shrink)

The Bhagavad Gītā has inspired more interpretive controversy than any other religious scripture in India’s history. The Gītā, a philosophical and spiritual poem of approximately seven hundred verses, is part of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata. In the Gītā, the Lord Kṛṣṇa, who appears in the form of a charioteer, imparts spiritual teachings to the warrior Arjuna and convinces him to fight in a just war that entails the slaughter of many of Arjuna’s own relatives and loved ones. Śaṅkara, (...) the great eighth-century champion of the Advaita school of philosophy, wrote the first extant commentary on the Gītā. In this commentary, Śaṅkara interpreted the Gītā strictly in accordance with Advaita.. (shrink)

Summary In his series of lectures, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Michel Foucault employs concepts from the military field of knowledge in order to analyse the founding scenes of psychiatry. I focus on three issues connected to Foucault's use of these military terms. Firstly, I examine why Foucault was reluctant to use concepts from sociology and psychology in Le pouvoir psychiatrique and how this affects the notions that he had formulated in his earlier work, Histoire de la folie. Secondly, I show how (...) he challenges traditional understandings of the founding scenes of psychiatry by using concepts from a different field of knowledge. In doing this, he creates metaphors, and this is something that he himself had previously been critical of doing. Thirdly, I reflect upon the fact that Foucault's creative use of concepts from different disciplines and examples from different historical times can be related to episodes in his own life; I argue why it is important to supplement a structural analysis with linguistic, phenomenological and hermeneutical ones. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The article states the core thesis about two asymmetric modes of existence of war – physical and discursive. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the analytical and practical necessity of distinguishing between two modes of existence of hybrid warfare as a phenomenon of physical reality and as a discursive construct, as well as to raise questions about the value specificity of the relationship between them. The methodology of work represents the implication of two asymmetric modes of war existence (...) – physical and discursive. The relationship between the two modes can be described in particular through modern cognitive-semantic and communicative approaches. Analysis, synthesis, description, distinction, historical perspective, forecasting and hermeneutic tools of comprehension are the core methods of this work. In the military dimension, any military confrontation in general is localized, while the discourse of this hybrid war has become global. The interpretive component of hybrid warfare is implemented through discursive verbal-semiotic means. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the concept of victory. The Ukrainian dimension embodies the postmodern practical representation of the analysis of the problem of hybrid warfare as a war of interpretations. (shrink)

Having thought out the Enlightenment project of individualism, privacy, and autonomy to its end, Anglo-American ethical theory now finds itself unable to respond to the collapse of community in which the practices justified by this project have resulted. In the place of reasonable deliberation about the goals to be chosen and the means to them, we now, it seems, have only what MacIntyre has aptly called “interminable debate” among “rival” positions, debate in which each party merely contends with the others (...) for its own advantage. And this circumstance MacIntyre himself seems unable to escape despite his best efforts. In further elaborating Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical reception of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, and in referring simultaneously to Edmund Burke’s parallel political rhetoric, among other tradition-oriented arguments in the English language, this book seeks a recollection of shared ethical principles, a recollection which alone, it is argued, might prevent the devolution of discussion into war with words and make possible some measure of consensus, however provisional and shadowed by dissent it will be. (shrink)

This book introduces the field of hermeneutics through a critique of military operations in Afghanistan. Following a brief survey of modern political history of the country, the authors examine the link between cultural factors and the inefficiency of nation-building operations. Additionally, the project discusses contending academic approaches to culture, and identifies shortcomings in their theoretical propositions for military operations in failed states. Ultimately, this volume contextualizes the evolution of hermeneutical thinking and the benefits it provides in assessing the transformation (...) of culture through military intervention. (shrink)

In Higher Superstition, published early in 1994, biologist Paul R. Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt denounced an `Academic Left' at once militant and ill-informed in its criticisms of science. Gross and Levitt showed sharp eyes for the pretentious and absurd in the works of American postmodernists, feminists, multiculturalists, radical environmentalists and, alas, exponents of science studies -- that is, historians, philosophers and sociologists of science. In the Autumn of 94, physicist Alan Sokal, inspired by Gross and Levitt's book, submitted a (...) spoof article portentously entitled `Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' to Social Text, a leading journal in the expanding field of cultural studies. As he later told Janny Scott of the New York Times : I structured the article around the silliest quotations about mathematics and physics from the most prominent academics, and I invented an argument praising them and linking them together. All this was very easy to carry off, because my article wasn't obliged to respect any standards of evidence or logic. The editors of Social Text were hoodwinked. By an unhappy coincidence, shortly after receiving Sokal's article they decided to produce a special `Science Wars' collection, including the unrefereed article together with responses to Higher Superstition. `Transgressing the Boundaries' duly appeared in the Spring/Summer 96 double issue, accompanied by articles from a number of those denounced by Gross and Levitt and lampooned by Sokal -- the perfect setting! (shrink)

Introduction. The article analyzes the problem of memory of the Great Patriotic War in the story “Quarry” by the Belarusian writer Vasil Bykov. The memory of the War, as the authors of the article demonstrate, has special qualities and characteristics for those who participated in it, for those who really want to remember the War and really remember it. The purpose of the study. The paper shows how it is possible to interpret the phenomenon of memory in mythological and religious (...) modes based on the material of V. Bykov’s novel “The Quarry”. Methods. The article uses the phenomenological method of A. Augustine and M. Heidegger, which leads to the existential time series of the “inner man”, as well as the method of creative hermeneutics, which allows to trace stable semantic structures behind the artistic canvas of V. Bykov’s text. The scientific novelty of the research. The mythological aspect of memory returns the characters to the point and event of the “beginning”, in which the formation of an integral self-aware personality took place, into an ontological event constituting the foundation of human identification. Such an event is a tragic, existential event. This event remains relevant in memory, not transient, not disappeared, and determines the characteristics of the subjectmemory all his life. This aspect of memory is opposed to “historical time”, according to which the past has already passed in memory; one should live and think today-the present and the future. The religious aspect of the story’s memory, as interpreted by the authors of the article, lies in the importance of memory, which it has in overcoming the power of time. Based on Augustine’s analysis, proposed by him in Confessions, the authors bring together the logic of V. Bykov’s memory research in this story and the reasoning of Bishop Hippo. Results. Memory endows the events of the past with living qualities of the present time and, thus, memory as a “memory of the sacrifice-ransom”, on the one hand, constantly encourages a Christian believer to think about death, and on the other hand, it is also an instrument of victory over it. In the matter of salvation, a religious person must remember himself, his deeds/offenses, his loved ones, the sacrifice of those and the One who redeemed this life and life in general with his death. In popular culture, in the religious worldview, in the historical attitude to life, such an attitude to memory is denied and causes misunderstanding. Hence, the attitude to the memory of the War in V. Bykov’s work seems outdated, archaic and irrelevant, which the authors of this article disagree with. Conclusions. The authors of the article conclude that the position of the writer front-line soldier V. Bykov in relation to the memory of the War is the position of “paradoxical evidence” and this position allows the author to really, most reliably and psychologically accurately describe from the “inanimate world” that area of the dead, terrible, inhuman that War creates and produces. And it turns out that it is necessary to remember this and think about it in order to be truly alive. (shrink)

As with a previous colloquium at Moscow in 2004, when my topic was literature in the Federal Republic of Germany during the post-World War II decades, I want to speak about tensions between war and postwar generations in Russia and in Germany, and my perspective will again be largely autobiographical. Of course this convergence (bordering on repetition) is not random. For I believe that remarkably complex affinities exist between Germany after the twelve-year-short nightmare of National Socialism and Russia after the (...) long stagnation of the Soviet Union. In both cases, a national collapse made cultural circles and newly elected governments…. (shrink)

This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of . Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, (...) and grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center (the foreign) and tik (international), as opposed to bilāt (England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination. (shrink)

The Space Act of 1958 begins, “The Congress hereby declares that it is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.” In March 1982, a Defense Department official commented on the statute: “We interpret the right to use space for peaceful purposes to include military uses of space to promote peace in the world.”1 The absurdity of this willful misinterpretation amazed me on first reading, and months (...) later it readily came to mind when I was looking for an effective way to illustrate the politics of interpretation. With just the right touch of moral indignation, I offered my literary criticism class this example of militaristic ideology blatantly misreading an antimilitaristic text.“But … the Defense Department is right!” objected the first student to speak. Somewhat amused, I spent the next ten minutes trying, with decreasing amusement, to show this student that the Reagan administration’s reading was clearly, obviously, painfully wrong. I pointed to the text. I cited the traditional interpretation. I noted the class consensus, which supported me. All to no avail. It was at this point that I felt that “theoretical urge”: the overwhelming desire for a hermeneutic account to which I could appeal to prove my student wrong. What I wanted was a general theory of interpretation that could supply rules outlawing my student’s misreading.This little hermeneutic fable introduces the three topics of my essay. One topic is the theoretical moment that concludes the narrative; another is the simple plot, a brief rhetorical exchange; and finally there’s the institutional setting in which the exchange takes place. These three topics preoccupy the sections that follow. Section 1 analyzes the problems resulting from the theoretical urge, the impasse of contemporary critical theory. Section 2 proposes my solution to this impasse, a solution I call rhetorical hermeneutics, which leads in section 3 to a rhetorical version of institutional history. 1. “National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958,” United States Statutes at Large , vol. 72, pt. 1, sec. 102, p. 426; Robert Cooper, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, quoted in Frank Greve, “Pentagon Research Retains Vision of ‘Winning’ N-war,” Miami Herald, 27 Mar. 1983, sec. D, p. 4. Steven Mailloux, associate professor of English at the University of Miami, is the author of Interpretive Conventions: the Reader in the Study of American Fiction. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled Rhetorical Power: Politics in American Literature, Criticism, and Theory. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Stanley Fish’s ‘Interpreting the Variorum’: Advance or Retreat?” and “Truth or Consequences: On Being Against Theory”. (shrink)

The paper is guided by three goals. First, it shows that the methodological standpoint of classical Husserlian phenomenology provides us with reliable tools to resist the grand narratives that proliferate during times of war. Second, it demonstrates that phenomenology provides much-needed methodological support for hermeneutically-oriented reflections on war. Third, it shows how the gruesome reality of World War One introduced a practical turn in Husserl’s phenomenology by forcing Husserl to rethink the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics. Tracing the development of (...) phenomenological metaphysics in Husserl’s Fichte lectures, Kaizo articles and private correspondence, the paper shows that, in response to war, Husserl deliberately chose not to engage in straightforward reflections on war, but instead to write about the prospects of peace. Reflections on cultural renewal necessitated him to rethink phenomenology as practical philosophy. The entanglement of praxis and theoria in Husserlian phenomenology relies upon the establishment of a metaphysically-grounded conceptual bond that ties reason to love and faith, which in its own turn suggests that a human being is not merely animal rationale, but also animal amans and animal religiosum. Ultimately, the possibility of cultural renewal relies upon a metaphysical broadening of Husserl’s conception of philosophy as rigorous sciences. (shrink)

The Freud Wars offers a comprehensive introduction to the crucial question of the justification of psychoanalysis. Part I examines three powerful critiques of psychoanalysis in the context of a recent controversy about its nature and legitimacy: is it a bankrupt science, an innovative science, or not a science at all but a system of interpretation? The discussion makes sense of the entrenched disagreement about the validity of psychoanalysis, and demonstrates how the disagreement is rooted in the theoretical ambiguity of the (...) central concept of psychoanalysis, the unconscious. This ambiguity is then presented as the pathway to a new way of understanding psychoanalysis, based on a mode of thinking that precedes division into mental and physical. The reader is drawn into a lively and thought-provoking analysis of the central issues: · What would it mean for psychoanalysis to count as a science? · Is psychoanalysis a form of hermeneutics? · How can mental and physical explanations coincide? Part II contains the source material for Part I: the influential critiques of psychoanalysis by Adolf Grünbaum, Thomas Nagel and Jürgen Habermas. No specialised knowledge is assumed, and the book is clear and accessible while still conveying the complexity and richness of the subject. It provides a fascinating introduction to philosophical thinking on psychoanalysis for students and practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and philosophy. (shrink)

German Editorial to the Special Issue on Philosophical Theories of War: Contemporary Challenges and Discussions presenting an overview of the latest state of the debate.

This article blends cultural history and theoretical psychology in a discussion of new treatment methods for psychiatric casualties that emerged early in World War II. It draws on philosophical hermeneutics and Hacking's historical ontology to clarify how our interpretation of this history inevitably reflects current struggles making sense of PTSD while efforts to understand this history can enrich present-day reflections about war neurosis and the social good. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

After being severely injured by a mine explosion in Afghanistan, former British soldier, Harry Parker, wrote about his experiences in his debut novel, Anatomy of a Soldier. Narrated by objects, this ‘novel’ is an innovative and important literary intervention. In this extended review article, I explore the phenomenological and sociological insights of this work. I begin by making two related hermeneutic claims: Firstly, I argue that this work should be understood phenomenologically, exposing how the Self is coextensive with its material (...) world. Secondly, I confront the generic ambiguity of the text and suggest that it should be read as (phenomenologically) autobiographical. Building on this phenomenological interpretation, I then explore three sociological implications of this object narrative method, namely, about motivation, agency, and intersubjectivity: Parker’s narrating objects, I argue, unveil a phenomenologically constituted and temporally elongated form of agency. Overall, I show that this ‘novel’ offers significant insights into experience, behaviour, and Self, both in the context of war and more broadly. (shrink)

Sacrifice, solidarity, and social decadence were essential themes not only for Patočka's philosophical work, but also for his personal life. In the "Varna Lectures" sacrifice is characterized uniquely as the privation of a clear telos, as counter-escapist, and as sutured to a comportment of finite life that is non-causal and non-purposive. In his Heretical Essays a similar hope is expressed to extract meaningfulness from use-value, and to deploy a Socratic and Christian "Care for the Soul" that can counteract the decadences (...) of our age. These interests and developments of the practice and notion of sacrifice point to Patočka's double-hereticism, both of the post-industrial age of technological advancement, and of what had become the unthought-through of the Christian tradition. In both senses, his theory of sacrifice is not unlike that of St. Paul, who saw the necessity of counter-acting the decadence and pompousness of the Corinthians by calling them to become "scum of the earth." This helps reveal how sacrifice presumes, in general, an operative notion of waste, and this paper seeks to lend further understanding to the relation between solidarity and sacrifice by developing, from out of Patočka's own work, precisely how waste figures prominently in such a relation. Waste may be refused by merit of being deemed to have no value; waste can mark a layer of expenditure of using "something up" in a way that overlooks its societal surplus; and waste could depict whatever is, like a wasteland, uncultivable and barren. Waste then is employed in the essay as a heuristic tool for understanding how the normalization of the relation between solidarity and sacrifice is in need of being inverted, and how this inversion has consequences also for how solidarity can be considered in relation to atonement. (shrink)

Process hermeneutics attempts to solve the philosophical problem of the destructive effect of relativism in order to establish a common ground on which our metaphysical and ethical dialogue can be possible. In the postmodern context, we confront a very different hermeneutic task from that of modern hermeneutics. As Jean-François Lyotard characterizes postmodernity as “a war on totality,” postmodern hermeneutics criticizes the modern triumphalist rationality that claims such absolutisms as scientific objectivism, epistemological foundationalism, and moral universalism. Process (...) class='Hi'>hermeneutics welcomes this postmodern iconoclastic urge against modern absolutism. However, it suspects the postmodern transition from meta-narrative to local-narrative that causes a difficulty for apossible common scholarship. In the postmodern relativization, an astute thinker asks whose interpretation, whose authority, whose criteria counts, and why. This paper proposes that process hermeneutics offer an alternative understanding to our postmodern studies and dialogues. (shrink)

lthough it was in the early eighties when I began to feel a growing disaffection with the radicalized academic left, a decisive nausea—inducing body blow was administered by the PMLA of january 1989. In that infamous issue appeared a letter signed by twenty-four feminist academics attacking the eminent Shakespeare scholar Richard Levin, for "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy," which had appeared in PMLA the year before. Levin’s essay, the work of a well-tempered, open-minded, and liberal supporter of many radical reforms (...) in the academy, was a penetrating critique of the feminist identity politics that were trying to wrest Shakespeare into the persona of a feminist scourge of sexism and patriarchy. Levin’s temerity in taking on the distortions of identity politics was threatening enough, but his Enlightenment style and Swiftian wit, which he brilliantly deployed to dismantle the tendentious and self—serving hermeneutics of the "dictatorship of virtue" (a phrase I borrow here from Richard Bernstein) that constitutes avant-garde millenarianism in the U.S. academy, served further to inflame the hypersensitive skins of his holier-than-thou critics, who brook no criticism.. (shrink)

Pacifism, as well as just war theory, are expressions of one’s general hermeneutic of reading the Bible. In recent New Testament hermeneutics, while the so-called old perspective might have more resonance with just war theory, both the new perspective and apocalyptic open the door to a hermeneutically based pacifism. I examine the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s under the category of a “Christoform hermeneutic,” namely, an approach to Christian ethics and the Christian and state that takes the suffering and cross (...) of Christ as the chief orientation point. (shrink)

lthough it was in the early eighties when I began to feel a growing disaff'ection with the radicalized academic left, a decisive nausea-inducing body blow was administered by the PMLA of January 1989. In that infamous issue appeared a letter signed by twenty-four feminist academics attacking the eminent Shakespeare scholar Richard Levin, for "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy," which had appeared in PMLA the year before. Levin's essay, the work of a well-tempered, open-minded, and liberal supporter of many radical reforms (...) in the academy, was a penetrating critique of the feminist identity politics that were trying to wrest Shakespeare into the persona of a feminist scourge of sexism and patriarchy. Levin's temerity in taking on the distortions of identity politics was threatening enough, but his Enlightenment style and Swiftian wit, which he brilliantly deployed to dismantle the tendentious and self-serving hermeneutics of the "dictatorship of virtue" (a phrase I borrow here from Richard Bernstein) that constitutes avant-garde millenarianism in the U.S. academy, served further to inflame the hypersensitive skins of his holier-than-thou critics, who brook no criticism.. (shrink)

Examining the continuities and differences between war and war-like violence, focusing on the war like violence of racism and rape through the lens of Sartre’s ontology of “The Look”, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of a body schema, and Beauvoir’s analysis of women as “the sex”, I argue that war-like violence deploys the affect perceptions of shame, degrada-tion, humiliation and disgust to violate the ontological contract of intersubjectivity and mutual vulnerability.

The article constitutes the second part of a larger paper concerning the philosophical heritage of Mr. Cogito, the lyrical subject of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems. The self-consciousness of the title character is formed, quite like in P. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of existence, in relation to the sphere of history and culture, as well as to the other. Mr. Cogito, when confronted with the war and annihilation, cannot simply use the Cartesian deductive method of reasoning in order to intelligibly prove the existence (...) of God and an immortal soul. Therefore, he refers in his philosophical thinking not merely to rationalism, but also to symbol, which more profoundly than ratio describes the nature of his existence. When challenged by boundary situations, he unsuccessfully attempts to find consolation in the Upanishads, Stoicism, or the wisdom of Chasidism. His attitude towards the modern philosophy of nature as well as to the relative motion theory is that of a sceptic; he juxtaposes them with Aristotle’s Logic. The propensity of contemporary Western civilization to follow magic or gnosis is perceived by him as a sign of self-delusion, or even self-destruction. (shrink)

This paper argues that Jan Patočka and Paul Ricoeur endured their own cognitive-spiritual crisis, particularly during the development and outbreak of war in the 1930s. Their philosophies of history are thus, on the one hand, born of a rethinking of modern philosophy from the time of Galileo and Descartes, and on the other, a suffering of crisis that Europe itself was suffering. Stemming from the historical and philosophical context of Husserl’s epistemology in the Krisis, both Ricoeur and Patočka had to (...) confront history and the decadence of European sciences, as it concerns the difficulty of remembering the past and describing events in history. These responses to the problem of modern philosophy and science in Europe point to the symptom of spiritual crisis due to ‘modern man’ having no unified worldview. By means of care of the soul and the challenging of the state in action, a hermeneutics of peace emerges from their spiritual crises. (shrink)

The ‘critique of intellectuals’ refers to a genre of normative discourse that holds intellectuals accountable for the consequences of their ideas. A curious feature of the contemporary, especially American, variant of this genre is its focus on intellectuals who were aligned with such world-historic losers as Hitler and Stalin. Why are Cold War US intellectuals not held to a similar standard of scrutiny, even though they turn out to have been aligned with the world-historic winners? In addressing this general question, (...) some self-serving tendencies of intellectual history are observed, in particular the asymmetry between the ease with which intellectuals are credited with the good consequences of their ideas and the difficulty with which they are blamed for the bad consequences. This asymmetry is particularly noted in Richard Rorty, whose pragmatism treats past ideas as a legacy intended for the (American) reader’s benefit. As a corrective, I advocate, in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ that treats intellectual life as fraught with danger, as our adoption of ideas always amounts to passing judgement over those who have borne them in the past. (shrink)

1 Introduction1 In the 1980s, hermeneutics was often incorporated into deconstructionism and literary theory. Rather than focus on authorial intentions, the nature of writing itself including codes used to construct meaning, socio-economic contexts and inequalities of power,2 Gadamer introduced a different perspective; the interplay between effects of history on a reader’s understanding and the tradition(s) handed down in writing. This interplay in which a reader’s prejudices are called into question and modified by the text in a fusion of understanding (...) and topic revitalized the study of the printed word. Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being also appealed to the post-modern antipathy toward modernity and metaphysics.3 If the truth and validity of interpretations are limited to communities of language, then our mode of being in history cannot but be historical. This point of view rendered Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics vulnerable to the critique of moral and epistemological relativism. However, Gadamer’s theory of interpretation also stems from re-examination of the beginning of knowledge in the Pre-Socratics and Plato, and on this basis, is receptive to another dimension of inquiry than that which was trending in North America. -/- At the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1982, Chung-ying Cheng for the first time introduced onto-hermeneutics to an audience of esteemed philosophers including Li Zehou, Ren Jiyu, Feng Youlan, and Zhang Liwen.4 In contrast to schools of deconstruction and literary theory that had disengaged the interpreter from trans-historical sources of meaning and truth, Cheng explained that interpreters exist within a cosmological order inextricable from responsibility to harmonize Heaven and Earth in creative acts of interpretation. By integrating Chinese cosmology into hermeneutics through ontology, he tacitly challenged philosophers in the West to re-examine assumptions about humanity’s place in nature and by implication, Gadamer’s recovery of the beginnings of knowledge in Western philosophy. -/- Cheng’s Neo-Confucianism is inspired by the method and goals of Thomé H. Fang. The following words by Fang seem to prefigure, although in an indistinct and bundled way, aspects of Cheng’s philosophy including a Mencian theory of human nature, comprehensive observation, and creativity: “In the very process of living in concord with creative Nature, Man is charged with an ideal to be fully realized in the light of the principle of comprehensive harmony.”5 Like Fang, Cheng reinvigorates Chinese culture and language, but not solely in order to vindicate the insights of Neo-Confucianism. He has studied Western thought, from pragmatism and the analytic school to German idealism and phenomenology, to unlock and clarify philosophical concepts within the Yijing tradition and thereby render them intelligible to Anglophones. The result has been an awakening of Western scholars to the moral and cultural consequences of decoupling their thought from metaphysical foundations that are neither dogmatic nor doctrinal. -/- Not unlike the dialectic of Gadamer’s dialogue form, onto-generative hermeneutics integrates contrary positions on the same topic in order to blend both sides into a world philosophy, or as Cheng says, a “totalizing or integrative theory,”6 not to be confused with a theoretical rewording of a theory. On the contrary, the universal scope and relevance of hermeneutics stems from personal experience. Just as Gadamer, in response to faction and strife, immersed himself in Plato during the war years, and developed a method with which to harmonize opposites, so too, according to On-cho Ng, was Cheng moved by faction, strife and political persecution to develop a path toward unity.7 Gadamer taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and Cheng at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa among other institutions in North America. They facilitated trans-continental educational and cultural ties. Similar experiences yield similar insights irrespective of differences of time and place. Hence, authors in this issue who reside in Europe, China and North America, delineate the differences between Gadamer and Cheng, yet also, in light of Cheng’s onto-generative method and cosmology, develop integrative theories. Due to the page-budget restriction of the publisher, certain articles of this special theme will be subsequently published in the next issue. -/- 2 Integrative Theory This special issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy confirms a dimension of hermeneutics that Cheng has both motivated and inspired. The contributors do not abide by the conviction that since thought is mediated by language, interpretations cannot transcend culture. On the contrary, their research exemplifies the fruits of trans-historical onto-dialogical hermeneutics within limits defined by their field inquiry, organized into Parts I and II, around three themes: language, the philosophy of history and ethics. -/- Andrew Fuyarchuk introduces the theme of ontology in relation to Gadamer’s turn to language. Fuyarchuk argues that Chung-ying Cheng’s criticism of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is informed by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and thereby overlooks how Gadamer’s Platonic-Pythagorean problem of the division between the One and Many is harmonized in the event of language, which in turn positions Gadamer in proximity to the presupposed grounds of receptivity in Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. Lauren Pfister’s contributing article addresses the year 2000 meeting between Cheng and Gadamer in Heidelberg and expands the transhistorical grounds of meaning in Gadamer to matters of theology. Pfister’s summary of the written Chinese record of their conversation indicates that Cheng does not address the role of Christian philosophy and hence, the role of the inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. This is important not only for detecting changes in Cheng’s philosophical development, but also for modifying his hermeneutics along the lines of a living conversation, possibilities explored by Pfister in a sequel to the article submitted to this issue. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of how Gadamer’s turn to language for understanding the meaning of Being extends possibilities in Cheng’s thought, Pfister anticipates the article by Katarina Gajdosova. She returns to the roots of Chinese thought during the Warring States period and broadens the meaning of names in recently excavated texts. Contrary to the conventions about how to understand terms, she appeals to both Heidegger’s ontology and Cheng’s notion of receptivity and creativity to reinterpret naming in relation to cosmology. Along the same lines, insofar as the event of Being is lingual, Jay Goulding captures its emergent structure in an evolving community of scholars and scholarship. He recalls his philosophical journey toward Cheng’s philosophy that begins in conversations with Gadamer at McMaster University in Hamilton, leads to Heidegger and Asian thought, expands into turning points with teachers and colleagues from various backgrounds that by increments contributed to Goulding’s formulation of “Daoist phenomenology.” -/- Although differing traditions guide their inquiries and research, Cheng and Gadamer recall the wisdom of the past to ameliorate the fragmentation in contemporary life. This leads them to re-examine the origins of philosophy; historical roots and thus sources of creative re-interpretations East and West whose affinities are developed in contributions by Hyun Höchsmann and Friederike Assandri. Höchsmann assesses convergences and divergences in the origins of Chinese and Western philosophy (Confucius and Socrates, the Yijing and Pre-Socratics) that culminates in pairing Gadamer’s understanding of paideia in the context of Plato’s political cosmology in the Timaeus with moral and social cultivation in The Western Inscription. She delineates the limits of this comparison which in turn justifies introducing Vattimo’s notion of locality. Assandri’s comparative analysis moves between India and China, Buddhism and Tang Daoism. Based on Gadamer’s argument that writing detaches concepts from their cultural moorings, she defines and applies three levels of understanding in onto-generative hermeneutics to Buddhist terms that were assimilated into the Benji Jing and in so doing clarifies essential dimensions of Daoism. -/- Contributions by Stephen Palmquist and Nicholas Brasovan position Cheng in relation to Kant and Gadamer by way of Aristotle’s ethics respectively. On the one hand, Palmquist plots Cheng’s evolving criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy and draws on crucial dimensions of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reposition that criticism in a constructive relation to Kant’s emphasis on the philosophical conditions of morality while also indicating how religious dimensions of his thought answer Cheng’s concerns for lived moral action. For Palmquist, Gadamer enables a constructive criticism of Cheng. On the other hand, Brasovan compares Cheng’s Yijing-based account of moral deliberation with Gadamer’s Aristotelian-based ethics and reasons that in contrast to Cheng, Gadamer’s hermeneutical consciousness is disengaged from practical knowledge. For Brasovan, Cheng is a constructive critic of Gadamer. Palmquist and Brasovan’s divergent angles on Gadamer and Cheng map onto a dialectic of contrast and complementarity that constitutes the inner logic of Cheng’s philosophy. In other words, Gadamer and Cheng ought to be read alongside one another for the sake of removing discrepancies and contradictions, which constitutes the organic structure of their thinking. -/- 3 Our Mode of Being in History Is Not Historical The conversations between Cheng and Gadamer in this issue of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy pivot on language, philosophy of history and ethics within a comparative framework of analysis, but also explore the grounds that make the comparisons possible. Those grounds are informed by Chinese cosmology, and function to wrest Gadamer from the shadow of Heideggerian facticity and reposition him within the range of Cheng’s ideas about our place in nature that is embedded in his question about how mind emerges from inorganic matter.8 -/- For Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, human finitude, our ownmost individuating death ensures that hermeneutics is always open to the other as other, always on the way toward understanding the meaning of Being. To arrest the process in a concept of “the Absolute” cannot but represent someone’s point of view, and thereby render hermeneutics indistinguishable from ideology. However, insofar as finitude is defined by them in terms of an onto-theological concept of immorality, finitude is a metaphysical concept consistent with epistemologies and confuse beings with the meaning of Being. As a result, the celebrated political value of hermeneutics to always be on the way toward an understanding of the meaning of Being admits subtle variations on the same worldview that are insufficiently self-critical. -/- Gadamer scholars of Heidegger are right. A transformation in ethos and opening to the meaning of Being depends on awareness of finitude. Yet this awareness does not yield openness to more of the same, i.e., discourse structurally incapable of coming to unity but instead, for both Gadamer and Cheng, openness to a distinctly different ontological dimension of reality. As Sandra Wawrytko and So-Seong Park indicate,9 this ontological dimension is prefigured in the experience of being-as-a-whole or the totality of all possible relations in both Chinese totemic shamanistic rituals,10 and Greek Dionysian festivals.11 Through these religious experiences human ethos and therefore consciousness is expanded and elevated from being centered on one’s ownmost concerns toward an affinity with all sentient beings from insects and plants to animals. The channel for this affinity is an auditory disposition and hence, the emotions, compassion, and feeling response. -/- The capacity for an auditory disposition, or as Gadamer calls it, listening consciousness to respond to the inter-relationality and therefore inherent balance of nature is developed through music, song and dance of the religious rituals and festivals. They facilitate the unity of mind with nature. This use of music, that transforms ordinary consciousness, explains Cheng’s emphasis on the receptivity of feeling response in comprehensive observation, and Gadamer’s emphasis on openness to the other in attunement. However, an auditory disposition characteristic of pre-literate oral cultures that reveals the “All” need not rely on religion. As theorists about the evolution of language have explained,12 modern languages preserve their pre-historical past in music or prosody. That is to say, the song and dance that revealed the totality of inter-related beings to an ethos of comprehensive observation and attunement toward beings in classical civilizations is retained in the back-and-forth movement or rhythm of the dialogue form. Our mode of being in history is a mode of being in nature – through the music of language. -/- While alerting the reader to the limits of a nominalist interpretation, Gadamer expresses the inner law of the nature as follows: “in perishing there is always becoming, and in becoming there is always perishing.”13 Considered in process, opposites generate and blend into each other. This law of nature applies to everything.14 Hence, in a manner comparable to Pfister’s concluding insights, onto-dialogical hermeneutics is not only open to discrete events of otherness but moreover, to the moving structure of reality expressed, as Gajdosova suggests, in the existential moment of naming. Considered as interplay of tension and resolution with a life of its own, the dialectic of a dialogue is self-similar to the way in which an organism grows (by instinct). There is, therefore, a sense in which the art of interpretation extends the human mind into the eternal cycles of nature such that we participate in the articulation of the inner telos/homeostasis toward which all beings strive and importantly for Gadamer scholars of Heidegger, within the material limits of energy to which our embodied minds are self-evidently subject. In mortality there is always immortality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 611-631 [Access article in PDF] Galileo and Spinoza: Heroes, Heretics, and Hermeneutics T. M. Rudavsky Introduction My purpose in this paper is to explore what happens when a scientific methodology rooted in mathematical geometry is then applied to biblical hermeneutics. Galileo and Spinoza are both thinkers who, in their adoption of the methods of philosophy and science, challenged the (...) limits of their social, intellectual, and theological margins. Both thinkers were regarded by their peers as threats to the institutional life of their respective communities; both espoused doctrines that were regarded as heretical by their governing bodies. What I shall try to demonstrate is that Galileo and Spinoza share a methodological program of natural science which, rooted in a mathematical view of nature, is then applied to Scripture. It is this methodological preoccupation that dooms them both and ultimately subjects them to the charge of heresy.In this paper I shall examine the circumstances, both personal and ideological, surrounding the excommunications of both Galileo and Spinoza. The implications of the ideological impetus for the excommunications I situate in the process of "secularization of theology," a term used by Funkenstein to describe the scientific turn in the seventeenth century. 1 I want to compare the hermeneutic methods which were developed in two controversial works, Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, completed in 1615, and Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise,published anonymously in 1670, but possibly commenced [End Page 611] much earlier, and then to explore the application of these hermeneutic methods to the proof-text adduced by both writers, namely, Joshua 10:12-13. Galileo and Spinoza: The Scientific Quest By suggesting that Galileo and Spinoza represent the tensions inherent between religion and science, I am not simply acquiescing to the adversarial model of the science-religion wars as they have been portrayed by late nineteenth-century historians of science. These scholars would have us believe that science has been persecuted by religion: more specifically, that western science has been persecuted by the Catholic Church. For example, in his enormously influential work History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, John William Draper argued that the Church "became a stumbling block in the intellectual advancement of Europe for more than a thousand years." 2 On this antagonistic model, the history of scientific development was presented as a war against a narrow-minded establishment that feared science; the conflicts between science and religion were seen as a one-sided affair in which the Church sought to suppress truth-seeking scientists. Jewish institutions were not castigated nearly as maliciously on this view (perhaps, the cynic may argue, because by this point in history Jews wielded so little power).But as Brooke, Funkenstein, Feldhay, and others have reminded us, the Draper-White model of conflict between science and religion is overly simplistic. It is important to recognize that, especially in the early modern period, religion, philosophy, and science were mutually influential upon one another. Of course the term "science" is itself anachronistic when used in the early modern period. Were it not for the ubiquity of references to the "science-religion" wars, the term "natural philosophy" would be more appropriate. Funkenstein and Brooke have, for example, articulated many examples in which theological concepts influenced scientific and philosophical modes of discourse in the seventeenth century. 3It must be recognized too, that many of the struggles which occur between religion and science are not merely ideological wars but have a human dimension as well; ultimately, it is people who interact, not theories--personalities loom large and can affect the outcome of a debate. That this is certainly the case with both Spinoza and Galileo should come as no surprise. Rivka Feldhay, for example, argues that most accounts of Galileo are based on "overriding binary [End Page 612] opposition: that of the Church versus science," 4 an opposition which she claims is myopic and narrow. Scientific truths are not simply waiting to be discovered; they are embedded in social constructs. While I agree with Feldhay that social construction... (shrink)

DATA SHOW THAT THE STRATEGY OF ARGUING THAT A WAR IS UNJUST, or that we should oppose all wars, always loses the national debate that occurs before a war. Data also show, however, that articulating an alternative to the war fares much better. Facing this reality requires us to develop an additional ethic besides just war and pacifism—an ethic that articulates specific alternatives to a war.

In my paper, I document a “travel” journey of concept formation and its concrete expression in law, which also constituted a literal travel journey across continents. Through poetic-hermeneutical approaches to language, guided by previously existing concepts stemming from experiences of the Holocaust, communism, and African-American feminist analyses of rape as an attack on a racial/ethnic group, a previously invisible domain of the human condition was charted. Throughout history, sexual atrocities have been committed within the context of wars, but their weaponisation (...) as acts of genocide remained unarticulated. This changed in the 1990s with Serbia-Yugoslavia’s genocidal wars against its neighbours (Editorial comment: The author uses the term Serbia-Yugoslavia to refer to the entity that succeeded the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after Croatia and Slovenia declared independence on June 25th, 1991. The SFRY up to that point consisted of the six republics Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (including the so-called autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina), and Slovenia. Further declarations of independence by Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina on April 27, 1992, left only Serbia and Montenegro who the same day declared themselves to be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). In 2003, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was reconstituted as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which existed until Montenegro and Serbia declared their independence (on June 3rd and June 5th, 2006, respectively)). I sketch the genesis of the concept of sexual atrocities as genocide in connection with my personal journey and how it guided legal prosecution of this “new” crime. My own travel-experience began with my association with Asja Armanda, and her discovery of coordinated mass rapes, when she came to the aid of survivors fleeing the Serbian attacks on Croatia, crimes she attempted to bring to international attention to prevent their expansion into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Testimonials reached me in the U.S. as well. I went to Croatia to join Armanda, where we named the crime “sexual atrocities as genocide.” On the basis of this new concept, we filed a lawsuit in New York against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, pioneering this crime’s recognition under international law. I conclude with philosophical questions that Putin’s similar genocidal attack on Ukraine raises today. (shrink)

In our Age of Interaction, we need a historically based method for validating our ethics as standing on solid ground. Applying such a method to historical test times such as the Third Reich, the US Civil Rights Movement, and others, indicates that an ethic of incarnational discipleship, trinitarianly interpreted, passes the test. But this requires an interpretation of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount that corrects idealist interpretations, and points instead to realistic practices of deliverance. A new paradigm for interpreting the (...) Sermon on the Mount is demonstrated, with fourteen grace-based transforming initiatives of realistic deliverance from vicious cycles. A hermeneutic of analogical imagination is advocated for relating Jesus' practices in his context to effective practices of deliverance in our historical context. This points to realistic practices of just peacemaking that are effective in preventing wars and creating conditions that lead toward peace — and therefore are realistic for social ethics. (shrink)

The book called "Philosophy of the Gita," by Prof. Ramesh N. Patel, is a striking philosophical study of the celebrated Sanskrit text called the Bhagavad-gita which is known simply as the Gita. Patel's book proposes and develops a new hermeneutic called archaic coherentism and applies it to the Gita to distill and decode a comprehensive metaphysic and philosophy of action embedded in the text. A new conceptual translation of the Sanskrit text brings out this philosophy in clear detail. Philosophical essays (...) preceding the translation include analysis of the often-neglected background of war and morality, discussion of action, freedom and self-identity, delineation of a new synoptic philosophy of Hinduism, and unearthing of a strikingly original and innovative metaphysics of existence, energy and triple individuation. The translation of the Gita is followed by two critical essays called "Emerging Philosophy" and "Coherence and Exegesis." Patel's translation focuses on the conceptual rendering of every term, with no Sanskrit word left untranslated, even including the tough ones like guna and Brahman. The essay called "Emerging Philosophy" does away with all Sanskrit terms, to facilitate the understanding of the newly decoded Gita's philosophy as a whole. The essay called "Coherence and Exegesis" critically examines several scholarly standpoints on the Gita with Patel's sound philosophical reasoning. The innovative philosophy of the Gita that emerges through the book's analysis includes an original theory of individuation revealing a Platonic-type Form of individuation evolving at three levels: essential, actional and physical. The book is written for professional philosophers and Sanskritist Indologists. It generally assumes familiarity with logical problems of philosophy and with Sanskrit terms in Indian philosophy. The author has a rare dual training in Sanskrit and philosophy. He skillfully exploits both in this book to achieve an unusual outcome that should be of great interest and challenge to both professional philosophers as well as scholars of Indology. (shrink)

Violence against women is a global stigma. At least two conditionsstirred the global community: Malala Yousafzai who took a bullet in 2012 andwho advocate girl’s education to date, and the 2014 reported kidnap of 300Nigerian girls by Boko Haram. There are oppressive stereotypes of women.Violence can come in different forms. These can come as verbal abuse, intimatepartners violence, non-intimate partner violence, trafficking, forced prostitution,exploitation of labor, debt bondage, physical and sexual violence, sex selectiveabortion, female infanticide and femicide, deliberate neglect and (...) girl’s education,rape in war, dowry murder, pornography, dating violence, female genitalmutilation/circumcision, and acid attack. With the aid of Hermeneutics, therich allusions and strong Feminist voices that exhume the elements of VAW areinherent characteristics of the Cebuano-Visayan Feminist poetry. The poemsconvince women to reclaim femininity, regain self-worth, challenge patriarchy,defy social prescriptions and conventions for women’s behavior. The four selectedCebuano-Visayan poetry with sound Feminist voices are support systems forwomen. Further studies on VAW in Cebuano-Visayan poetry are recommended. Keywords: Hermeneutics, poetry, Violence Against Women , descriptive research,Cebuano-Visayan language, Philippines. (shrink)

The English Civil War brought an end to government censorship of nonconformist texts. The resulting exegetical and hermeneutical battles waged over baptism among paedobaptists and Baptists continued well into the Restoration period. A survey of the post-Restoration polemical literature reveals the following themes: 1) the polemical ‘slippery slope’ is a major feature of these tracts. Dissenting paedobaptists believed that Baptists would inevitably become Quakers, despising baptism altogether, and that the resulting social instability would allow the tyranny of Roman Catholicism to (...) reemerge in England. Baptists for their part compared the tyranny of paedobaptist argumentation to the tyranny exercised by Roman Catholics. Anti- Quakeriana and Anti-Popery were both central ‘devil terms’ in this polemical warfare; 2) the exegesis of biblical texts underlying infant baptism revealed contrary understandings of how the bible fit together as a whole. Baptists tended to read Old and New Testaments disjunctively, whereas paedobaptists saw continuity absent explicit abrogation; 3) scholastic theology continued to undergird the arguments of all parties. Especially relevant to this discussion was debate over the proper ‘matter’ and ‘form’ of baptism. Here exegetical and hermeneutical disputes were also relevant. This study reveals that patterns of reading Scripture in each community were informed by traditions and practices, and that the search for the objective ‘literal’ sense of the text was bound to be unavailing. (shrink)

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation and (...) resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. But the controversies attending his life--and death, which some ascribed to the CIA--are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative. Fanon's Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience--the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath--in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt. Reviews of this book: "The goal of this often brilliant and always engaging book is to 'read Fanon's texts as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative'; the principal subject of this dramatic narrative, according to Sekyi-Otu, is 'political experience'. It is his deployment of a dialectical analysis of Fanon's 'dramatic personae' that permits Sekyi-Otu's fresh and insightful readings to take place." DD--Anthony C. Alessandrini, Minnesota Review "Ato Sekyi-Otu departs from the postmodernist paradigm and ushers in an alternative hermeneutic that primarily considers Fanon's texts as forming 'one dramatic dialectical narrative,' that is a narrative whose complexity is correlative of the intricate configurations of African social experience during the post-independent era...[His] book is an invaluable contribution that offers broader scope for a new appreciation of Fanon's political thinking." DD--Marc Mve Bekale, Revue AFRAM Review [UK] "[I]mportant...The author succeeds in...revealing the complexity and nuanced character of Fanon's thought." DD--Choice "Those who would dismiss or exult Fanon as the high priest of revolutionary violence will be chastened by this patient and completely convincing exposition of his work. Sekyi-Otu produces a reflexive, 'Gramscian' Fanon who, working as a 'detective of the politics of truth,' has produced insights that need to be taken over into the core of democratic political thought." DD--Paul Gilroy, University of London. (shrink)

The article takes the excavated cosmological texts as a basis for reinterpreting the relationship between cosmology, epistemology, and action in Warring States period thought, by focusing on the role of names in situatedness and self-actualization of being. It proposes to view the speculative and the practical concerns in terms of a dynamic union of the receptive and the creative within the onto-generative cycle. Building on Chung-ying Cheng’s onto-generative approach and Heidegger’s hermeneutics of Dasein in Sein und Zeit, the article (...) identifies names as the centre in which the receptive and the creative aspect of being come together. (shrink)

Analyses of religious and cultural perspectives on the use of force continue to receive criticism for questionable motives, for insufficient holism, and for exaggerating uniqueness. Claims of recurrent problems educe consideration of interdisciplinary proposals designed to resolve related challenges. Thought together, some suggest that a transversal research program into ethical orientations toward war can facilitate fair and rigorous exploration of crosscultural similarities and differences. Tentative findings emphasizing textual precepts indicate some resonance amid diversity across eleven ethical frameworks including Western just (...) war thinking. Maximizing relevance depends upon expanding the range of orientations and practices studied. Future results might be integrated with knowledge about the influence of other variables to more completely capture the phenomenon of making judgments regarding the use of force in all its manifestations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bombs and Roses: The Writing of Anxiety in Henry Green’s CaughtLyndsey Stonebridge (bio)(The firemen saw each other’s faces. They saw the water below a dirty yellow towards the fire; the wharves on that far side low and black, those on the bank they were leaving a pretty rose.... They sat very still, beneath the immensity. For, against it, warehouses, small towers, puny steeples seemed alive with sparks from the (...) mile high pandemonium of flame reflected in the quaking sky. This fan, a roaring red gold, pulsed rose at the outside edge, the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness, were for a space a trembling green.)—Henry Green, CaughtWar, she thought, is sex.—Henry Green, CaughtRoses are not generally thought to be objects of anxiety. They are objects of desire, or better, objects that arrest desire by their invitation to aesthetic contemplation, but only for the phobic could a rose be said to be an occasion for dread. Writing during World War II, the British writer Henry Green (“a trembling green”) suggests otherwise. In this description of the London Blitz from his 1943 novel, Caught, everything comes up roses. 1 First among literary clichés, roses lend themselves to this kind of figurative estrangement (by virtue of which, in literature, a rose is in fact only very rarely a rose), and Green is by no means the only British writer in World War II to note that the fire and the rose are one. 2 In Caught, however, Green’s roses wreath desire and dread together so tightly that the psychoanalytic cliché—war is sex—snaps back into the tautology that Freud perhaps always intended.The idea that war could be sex was, of course, the scandal of Freud’s theory of the traumatic neurosis during World War I. As is well known, only a desexualized version of psychoanalysis was admitted into the field hospitals and the officer’s convalescent homes that sprang up in upper-class houses all over Britain. One of these was Green’s childhood home, which, he later said, like many of the overprivileged, opened up its doors to the wounded and traumatized in a calculated act of class preservation. 3 One does not have to [End Page 25] think too hard to appreciate why, for some at least, it was preferable to see these torn and shocked bodies as seized by a dreadful—but after all perfectly understandable—fear in the face of war, rather than gripped with a less comprehensible anxiety that carried with it a dangerous and potentially lethal sexual charge.The temptation to unsex trauma theory is still with us today. It is not quite that something has been occluded in contemporary debate and that this something is sexuality. It is more accurate to say that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the agon of sexuality—and particularly of the drives—is right at the heart of trauma, and that this, especially in the recent alliance of psychoanalysis and history, causes a certain awkwardness. One of the strengths of contemporary trauma theory lies in its articulation of a nuanced and subtle historicity, read through both psychoanalysis and literature, which allows the humanities to reconnect with historical violence, without (supposedly) falling into the pitfalls of a naive historicism [see Caruth]. The awkwardness comes because sexual antagonism is both clearly historical (the violence is well documented) and structurally necessary to psychoanalytic theories of trauma. The two, the historical and the psychic, are clearly not analogues, but they remain stubbornly and infuriatingly intertwined. 4Faced with this theoretical tangle, two options present themselves. The first is to privilege historical trauma over sexual trauma. Psychoanalysis, hence, provides an account of the multiple difficulties of historical representation while escaping the age-old accusation of sexual determination. War, thus, is not (only) sex. For all its hermeneutic power, this new historiography runs the risk of producing a trauma theory without, paradoxically, a psychoanalysis (an Orphics without Eurydice). The second is to insist on the structural necessity of sexuality and, in particular, of sexual difference, not as the ahistorical referent that lurks beyond representation but, as Slavoj Zizek has... (shrink)

This essay re-examines the once promising idea that style analysis can provide an independent source of insight into an artifact's non-stylistic context. The essay makes explicit the consequences of treating collective style as such a source in archaeology and anthropology of art, and further develops a new framing for the idea that avoids the criticisms largely responsible for the decline in theoretical interest in the epistemic import of visual style analysis since World War II. This re-framing proposes that inference from (...) style to context is permissible on those occasions when a collective style signals by its morphology its suitability to serve a certain function. And it does so because it prescribes publicly certain modes of behavior or spectatorship. Furthermore, the public nature of the signaling may be such that it allows even uninitiated spectators to get a sense of it and thus to gain access to some of the motivations and norms informing the collective's form of life. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The article aims to analyse the consciousness of masses in the communication system of the 20th century projecting the individual level onto the social one. _Theoretical basis._ In the fields of philosophy and other humanities since the middle of the last century there has dominated an opinion that the category of mass and its communication are second-rate and non-elitist phenomena. Condensing the experience of human history (especially – the nineteenth century – the time of the bourgeois revolutions and the (...) two world wars), such parameters were set by the creators of social psychology Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud in their basic research "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind", "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego". Since ancient times the masses have really resembled immoral emotional neoformations, which minimized the individual qualities of the components of the whole and showed the features of a predominantly animal nature. It is no coincidence that those masses were called emotional, or just a crowd, regardless of the topos of existence: streets and squares, or the infospace of the first mass media (newspapers, radio, cinema, television). However, analysing the crowd, the scientists noted that this is only an extreme modification of the mass, and, in addition to it, there may be others – quite the opposite in their nature. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the situation has changed: scientists and futurists have been talking about the mass of intellectuals, which seems to be formed and combined in the field of information technology. And it surpasses the traditional elite in many respects. _Originality._ Having analysed the works of classic and modern researchers, we came to the conclusion that in fact the masses, like individuals (according to C. G. Jung), are divided into four types. Correspondingly, each of them has its own behaviour, psychology, philosophy etc. This article focuses on beliefs and ideological positions as the basis for the functioning of emotional, sensory, intuitive and rational masses in the context of 20th century philosophy. The object of our analysis was the philosophical schools of neo-positivism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, existentialism, pragmatism, anthropology, phenomenology, and others. _Conclusions._ According to our assumption, regardless of the type of mass and direction of modern philosophy as a field of its implementation, rationalism comes to the fore everywhere (as a primary source and theoretical basis or motivation). Thus, it can be concluded that the rational mass now dominates, not emotional (which was thoroughly described by Le Bon and Freud). And this is quite natural in the age of digital technology. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. The article reveals the connection between the concept of nature of the transcendentalists R.W. Emerson and H.D. Thoreau and the Socio-Political Discourse of the 19th century United States of America. Specific socio-political aspects that formed the basis for the formation of manifestations about nature in the United States in the 19th century were: growing industrialization, the anti-slavery movement, and policies regarding the indigenous population. The article will note the impact of (...) these factors on the formation of the concept of nature. M e t h o d s. The method of historical reconstruction was used to reveal the socio-political context of the philosophy of nature of American transcendentalism. The hermeneutic method was used to interpret the philosophy of nature of R. V. Emerson and G. D. Thoreau, taking into account the socio-political context. A comparative method was used to find common and distinctive features in the philosophical views of American thinkers. The problem-based method made it possible to focus attention precisely on the problems in philosophical views and on the ways of their solution. And the contextual method, the purpose of which is to clarify the context of the appearance and development of a particular idea, this article focuses on the concept of "nature". R e s u l t s. As a result of the study, affinities between the theorization of abolitionism, reflection on industrialization, debate on the indigenous population and the philosophy of nature of American transcendentalism were revealed. C o n c l u s i o n s. The philosophy of the nature of American transcendentalism of R. W. Emerson and H. D. Thoreau is deeply rooted in the socio-political context of the United States of America before the Civil War and became the theoretical foundation of the abolitionist movement. The concept of nature in the philosophy of American transcendentalism is closely related to the socio-political discourse of the United States of America in the 19th century. Radical changes in society before the civil war stimulated the development of both social philosophy and the philosophy of nature. (shrink)