One of the scholars who have provided important contributions to the field of American studies in Romania is Professor Marius Jucan, PhD. The present paper is an attempt to decode, in only some pages, the type of discourse/writing that his books construct. The texts that make the subject of professor Jucan’s studies invite the reader and the writer to engage in a type of discovery that conditions understanding and induces revelations of diverse facets of ‘truth’– the (...) interplay of text and mind. Since such texts of the past, belonging to Henry James, H. D. Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, frequently superimpose the aesthetic discourse on the philosophical, sociological, cultural and/or political one, it is understandable why they can be consistently studied only by an erudite specialist. (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)

The article presents an interpretive view on culture wars in America along with their echoes in the autobiographical works written by Barack Obama. Being either viewed as the manifestation of the “post-American” creed, looked down at as a mere product of popular culture, or being ignored as a marginal manifestation, culture wars flared before and after the presidential campaign of 2008, signaling the intensity of a yet unconsumed ideological combustion fuelling further cultural and political dissensions. One of the (...) conspicuous consequences of culture wars in America is that the definition of culture has been significantly altered and that nowadays culture warriors have outnumbered intellectuals. Another outcome of culture wars is that they are considered by many as a benchmark of democracy and democratization, when more probably they are the product of an ideological confrontation. Thirdly, culture wars are regarded either as a political stylization of politicization of culture setting up a new network of correspondences between culture and politics. A final relevant consequence may be found in the increasing awareness that civil society and political parties may deploy different strategies to convey democratic ideals into reality, but it remains to be clarified if this should be carried out into the trenches of a pugnacious media and from there into the beliefs and expectations of citizens. Civil society and political parties in America construed differently the meanings of democracy, providing with different images the promised future and the American creed. Therefore, while culture wars spread their belligerency in various sectors of the American society, it is harder and harder to figure out a democratic consensus. (shrink)

The author attempts to sketch a general survey on the issue of secularization and de-secularization, as it appears in various present-day interpretations of the meaning of cultures, as well as in the comprehension of modernity. Taking as guiding point the process of secularization in Western Europe, but also considering the rebirth of religious life in Eastern Europe, the author looks at the flexible ways in which the relations between secularization and de-secularization should be dealt with in a permanent global transition.

Rereading Randolph Bourne’s most known essay “Trans-National America” (1916) provides the nowadays reader with a more accurate view perception of the cultural transmutations occurring at the beginning of the last century in America. Reflecting on the contrast between the ideals of liberal republican America and the reality of the assimilation policies, Randolph Bourne disagreed along with other intellectuals of his time with nativist attitudes and policies disfavoring or slighting immigrants and their heritage in twentieth century America. Wrestling to establish (...) a more equitable meaning of the cultural heritage in the actual making of American citizenship, other than the Anglo-Saxon one, Bourne employed William James’s concept of ‘consciousness’, mapping a new cultural content for the idea of ‘nation’, contributing to the public debate on pluralism. Arguing that American idealism was imperiled by the consequences of melting pot policies, Bourne envisioned modernist America as a ‘trans-national’ entity holding together a variety of ethnic communities lead by the same lofty democratic goals, assuming that equality of individuals should be paralleled by the equality of ethnic communities. “Trans-National America” appears as a landmark in the further evolution of pluralism, combining reformism with the intellectual utopianism in an attempt to enrich the meanings of American exceptionalism in a newly fashioned form. Apparently, the term ‘postmodern’ occurred for the first time in this early twenty century writing. (shrink)

Andrei Plesu, Comedii la portile Orientului (Farces at the Orient’s Gates) Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2005.

In Malicious Deceivers, Ioana B. Jucan traces a genealogy of post-truth intimately tied to globalizing modernity and connects the production of repeatable fakeness with capitalism and Cartesian metaphysics. Through case studies that cross times and geographies, the book unpacks the notion of fakeness through the related logics of dissimulation (deception) and simulation (performativity) as seen with software/AI, television, plastics, and the internet. Specifically, Jucan shows how these (dis)simulation machines and performative objects construct impoverished pictures of the world, ensuring (...) a repeatable sameness through processes of hollowing out embodied histories and lived experience. Through both its methodology and its subjects-objects of study, the book further seeks ways to counter the abstracting mode of thinking and the processes of voiding performed by the twinning of Cartesian metaphysics and global capitalism. Enacting a model of creative scholarship rooted in the tradition of writing as performance, Jucan, a multimedia performance-maker and theatre director, uses the embodied "I" as a framing and situating device for the book and its sites of investigation. In this way, she aims to counter the Cartesian voiding of the thinking "I" and to enact a different kind of relationship between self and world from the one posited by Descartes and replayed in much Western philosophical and - more broadly - academic writing: a relationship of separation that situates the "I" on a pedestal of abstraction that voids it of its embodied histories and fails to account for its positionality within a socio-historical context and the operations of power that define it. (shrink)

The author intends to look at Romanian cultural transition as an ongoing process which since 1989 has known an accelerated pace according to the fall of communism and the real perspectives of integration in the European Union. Seen within the cultural constraints of globalization, the impact of social and cultural change in Romanian society affected considerably the cultural behavior of the individual as well as the setting of new institutions, their functioning and implicitly the rhythm of (...) democratization. Remarking on modernization in Eastern Europe, the author consid- ers that unless civil society asserts its presence, reconstructing the Romanian public sphere, transition may be a reversible process. (shrink)

Daniel Barbu, Politica pentru barbari (Politics for Barbarians) Nemira, Bucharest 2005, 242 pages.

The study is part of an ampler research focusing on the issue of the mentalities (collective imaginary), seculariza- tion and the theory of the cultural models. The interre- latedness of these theoretical topics is approached on the basis provided by the qualitative analysis data, and attempts to demonstrate the variety of the consequences in the secularization process within culture, regarding them as seminal premises of producing novelty and dif- ference. However, secularization is assessed on a com- parative basis, in (...) accordance with the rise and develop- ment of present-day religiosity. Cultural models face on- going revision, reflecting the changes going on within the frame of the mentalities or the collective imaginary. Though the cultural model tends to embody the most feasible (pragmatic) representation of the imaginary, contextuality, contingency and historicity are part in the ultimate shaping of the model. (shrink)

1施莱尔玛赫 contribution to the development施莱尔玛赫for hermeneutics in the development of Historically hermeneutics In order to make a decisive turn when he made ​​the future "general hermeneutics" , hermeneutics will be applied to all text interpretation. When the traditional hermeneutics contains In order to understand, description and application,施莱尔玛赫the attention is hermeneutics as "the art of understanding." 施莱尔玛赫also introduced the interpretation of psychology, can penetrate the text by means of its author's individuality and flexibility soul. He wanted to become a systematic hermeneutics, (...) and criticism of previous hermeneutics is "the rules of the merger," and the lack of coherence. Wu Ning speaking, they deal with different issues is a combination of methods. 施莱尔玛赫hermeneutics points to avoid misunderstanding of the text. This part is up to the final discussion of施莱尔玛赫criticism of the United States. 2. Dilthey contribution to the philosophical hermeneutics of Dilthey on施莱尔玛赫In order to write the thesis, including In order to Protestant hermeneutics history, from the Reformation to the future as a second reference books. He was a learned scholar and has been on many topics regardless above. For our purposes, Dilthey is a philosopher with a passion for life, he was placed In order to humanities and social sciences and natural sciences in an established full equality of points, by the foundation on the hermeneutics In order to develop a basic methodology. But in the science competition, he was seeking "Allgemeingultigkeit", a universal validity, to do so In order to give him too much towards the foundation to the scientific methods of thought. He is still a major development of the character of philosophical hermeneutics. 3 Heidegger before and on philosophical hermeneutics, "and there is time" contribution to the development of philosophical hermeneutics is the decisive shift in Heidegger, born with the future, there are original philosopher The early works. He Freiburg Hu plugs Seoul assistant, and in the phenomenological Hu stopper Seoul In order to create a useful set up beyond the traditional methods of philosophy, but he is still too dependent on science Hu stopper Marco effectiveness. Part I: description of the evolution of the early Heidegger: "ontology - the fact of hermeneutics," the book published after the death of Heidegger was published in 1999, English translation, Heidegger in this series by the fact that the ontology of hermeneutics In order to give us a hermeneutic understanding of his meaning. In order to avoid the traditional hermeneutics of his meaning, In order to return to the ancient hope臘hermeneueinc and hermeneia idiom. He attempts to go beyond the limits of contemporary objects, through the period of return to the ancient hope臘general language idioms. Hermeneutic encounter with the interpretation of Homer's description of the mouth, publish, translate and interpret. His description of historical hermeneutics in the pull-down maps and sub ​​Lane Park after a groundbreaking Aristotle hope臘idioms in the loss of richness and decline. But the hermeneutics of Heidegger speaking the method is close to something, such as early speech hermeneutics In order to approach closer to the truth of it is understandable the former interpretation of this domain as there face life. For this last hermeneutics as the method of self-understanding, but in a letter to his students Engelbert Kerbs letter, Heidegger also emphasizes the history In order to recognize the character. Us from our understanding of historical context, our understanding of the structure is formed by shaping the concept of history and even our language. In Dilthey's hermeneutics, he also stressed that understanding the historical basis. From Dilthey to Heidegger this view. Heidegger in his speech defines hermeneutics as "the fact of participation, close, and descriptions of the same interrogation methods." Hermeneutics is the interpretation of not only understanding knowledge as a negative process, but active participation, interrogation and close. Fact of itself is interpreted, it is through understanding the questions and answers something. Heidegger back to the necessary conditions for our understanding of factors, understanding of "the former structure." He describes some part of the former, is awareness and understanding of nature, we understand something "to" something, and we understand it in a specific historical context. Further more, we expect to understand it in the presence of a sight, not a determining sexual arousal by the sight, by the basic problems of the future horizon, it is "the possibility of there," the sight, for there is a special special possible time horizon. These early works of Heidegger has been found there the possibility of meaning. We all都leadership to a new concept of the humanities. In addition, as a rational animal, as Aristotle said sub-Lane, who is of a future there may not be included, including the timing of there. People are looking to understand their own there. Instructions to Heidegger, hermeneutics offers a new concept for the person's point of view. Part II: there and time hermeneutics is first mentioned in the "there and the time," Section VII, Heidegger phenomenology has been interpreted as if it is. In order that he found "the meaning of phenomenological description as a way to rely on hermeneutics, phenomenology of this and some of the logos have hermeneuein the characteristics of this phenomenology is to use some basic meaning of the word hermeneutics, it indicates the work In order to interpret . "In the second sense, Heidegger found in hermeneutics裡are there for the meaning of this method of exposing the shield. The third meaning is the interpretation of this promising continuous manner so that its future is possible, it's future there. Section 31 of hermeneutics is important, because there is some understanding that is. Understanding the process is the center of human existence, in Section 32 entitled "interpretation and understanding," understanding the interpretation built on. Visit the world around it and understand things as this or that, always never as pure consciousness. As Heidegger said, "always had to watch as the ability to understand and interpret", in other words, there is no precedence in the interpretation of pure consciousness, there is always ask questions and interpretation of the visual field. Section 44, regardless Heidegger also true about management, in its modern form as a true statement, is always carried a deeper understanding and interpretation of the export process. But the really right is defined as the management there has been an associate of knot, so it access to basic ontology of sight. It is obvious that there's open, this hole is to guide him toward the police point of view of the artistic part of the next lecture will be discussed. This lecture primarily presents the two early works of Heidegger in which hermeneutics plays a definitive role. As background, the contributions of Schleiermacher and Dilthey are presented briefly before going into Heidegger's contribution. Ⅰ. Schleiermacher's Contribution to the Development of a Philosophical Hermeneutics Schleiermacher made a decisive turn in the history of hermeneutics when he proposed a "Universal Hermeneutics," a hermeneutics that would apply to all kinds of text interpretation. While traditional hermeneutics included moments of understanding, explication and application, Schleiermacher focused on hermeneutics as the "art of understanding . "Schleiermacher also introduced psychological interpretation whereby one tried to penetrate the individuality and soul of the author of a text. He wanted hermeneutics to be systematic, and he criticized previous hermeneutics for being only an" amalgam of rules "and lacking systematic coherence. Rather , they were methods for dealing with an array of different kinds of problems. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics was directed at avoiding misunderstanding of the text. At the end of this section Gadamer's criticisms of Schleiermacher will be discussed. Ⅱ. Dilthey's Contribution to Philosophical Hermeneutics Dilthey wrote his dissertation on Schleiermacher and included a history of Protestant hermeneutics since the Reformation as a second companion volume. He was a broadly educated professor and wrote on many topics. For our purposes, Dilthey was a life-philosopher with a passion for placing the Humanities and Social Sciences on an equal footing with the Natural Sciences by developing a basic methodology for them based on hermeneutics. But in competing with the sciences, he sought an "Allgemeingultigkeit," a universal validity, and in doing so he tended to give too much ground to the way of thinking in the sciences. Still, he is a major figure in the development of philosophical hermeneutics. Ⅲ. The Contribution of Martin Heidegger to Philosophical Hermeneutics before and in Being and Time The decisive turn in the development of a philosophical hermeneutics came in the early writings of Martin Heidegger, a radical and original philosopher. He was in Freiburg an assistant to Husserl and found in Husserl's phenomenology a useful way of overcoming traditional philosophy, but he still found Husserl too preoccupied with scientific validity. Part Ⅰ: Heidegger's Early Lectures: Ontology-the Hermeneutics of Facticity A posthumously published and translated set of Heidegger's lectures on ontology in terms of a hermeneutics of facticity gives us a sense of his understanding of hermeneutics. He bypassed the traditional sense of hermeneutics and went back to the Greek usage of hermeneuein and hermeneia. He attempted to overcome the limitations of modern objectivity by returning to the usages current in ordinary language in ancient Greece. There hermeneutics meant orally interpreting Homer, announcing, translating, and explaining. His account of the history of hermeneutics after Plato and Aristotle is a history of decline and loss of the richness found in Greek usage. But hermeneutics for Heidegger meant a means of access to something, and in these early lectures hermeneutics became an interpretive means of access to facticity, to the realm of pre-interpretive understanding as Dasein faces life. Ultimately hermeneutics became a means for the self-understanding for Dasein. But in a letter to his student, Engelbert Krebs, Heidegger also emphasizes the historical character of cognition. We understand from our situation in history, and our understanding is structured by historically shaped concepts and even our language. Dilthey, too, emphasized the historical matrix for understanding in his hermeneutics, and Heidegger took this up from Dilthey. Heidegger defined hermeneutics in the opening lines of the lectures as "the unified manner of the engaging, approaching, accessing, interrogating, and explication of facticity." Hermeneutics as interpretation is not just understanding as a passive process of cognition but an active engaging, interrogating, and accessing. Facticity itself is interpretive in that it sees what something is through question and answer. Heidegger is stepping back into the factors that precondition our understanding, the "forestructure" of understanding. This forehaving, he says, belongs to the very nature of knowing and understanding. We see something "as "something, and we see it in a specific historical situation. Furthermore, we see it in an existential horizon of expectation, a horizon haunted by uncertainty, by the" fundamental questionability of the future, that is of "possible being," of what is possible for this particular being at this particular time and place. Already in these early works Heidegger finds in the sense of what is possible being, a sense of "ontic questionability, care, restlessness, anxiety, temporality." All of this leads to a new conception of humanity. Instead of being an animal endowed with reason, as in Aristotle, a human being is a being with a possible future, a being with temporality. Humans are beings seeking to know themselves. Hermeneutics, Heidegger says, offers the standpoint for a new conception of the human being. Part Ⅱ: Being and Time The first mention of hermeneutics is in section 7 of Being and Time, where Heidegger is already interpreting phenomenology as letting what is show itself. He finds that " the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation. The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of hermēneúein. The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the original signification of the word, where it designates the work of interpreting. "In a second sense, Heidegger finds in hermeneutics a means of uncovering the meaning of being for Dasein. And the third sense is the interpretation Dasein as continually making its future possibilities, its future being. Section 31 is important to hermeneutics because there the being of Dasein is said to be understanding. Understanding is the central process of an existing human being. In section 32, titled "Understanding and Interpretation," interpretation builds on understanding. It looks around at the surrounding world and sees things as this or that, always already , never as pure perception. As Heidegger puts it, "The seeing of this sight is always already understanding and interpreting." In other words, there is no pure perception prior to interpretation; there is always the horizon of questioning and interpreting. In section 44, Heidegger argues that truth, too, in its modern forms as statements which are true, is derivative from the deeper processes of understanding and interpreting that are always already going on. But when truth is rightfully defined in connection with being, then it moves into the horizon of fundamental ontology. It is the disclosure of being. This insight is part of what leads him to his view of art, which we will discuss in the next lectur. (shrink)

Jean-Francois Mattei, Barbaria interioara. Eseu despre imundul modern (On Inner Barbarity. An Essay on the Modern Vile) Traducere de Valentina Bumbas-Vorobiov, Paralela 45, 2005, 316 pagini.

The background of this article is the ethical challenges presented by patronage that has been highlighted by the present coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. The aim of the article is to understand the role patronage plays in Africa from the perspective of a relevant African hermeneutic. Like many studies undertaken in an African setting, it uses a comparative methodology to create a dialogue between a socio-historical textual analysis of the biblical text and the socio-economic and religio-cultural realities of African contexts. (...) It specifically uses an analogical paradigm that compares the reception of the biblical tradition in a specific historical critical context to its reception in modern-day African contexts. The result of the comparison is that the misuse of patronage is engaged from the perspective of the response of early Christian writers to patronage in the 1st century. This initial exploration has indicated that an analogous comparative approach has the potential to provide deeper insights in understanding the relationship established by patronage in African contexts. The conclusion is that in its engagement with patronage in Africa, the church must encourage its members to ask if it establishes parasitic or exploitative relations, if it is beneficial to the whole society over an extended period of time and if a clear distinction is made between public and personal resources. Ultimately, it needs to be asked if benefaction reflects the will of God and enhances the reputation of the congregation of God. CONTRIBUTION: The contribution of the article is in clarifying the potential analogical comparisons for studying the Bible in Africa and for the formulation of a critical African ethic. (shrink)

Matei Cãlinescu, Cinci fete ale modernitãtii. Modernism, avangardã, decadenþã, kitsch, postmodernism. (Five Faces of Modernity. Modernism, Avant-Guard, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism) Collegium, Polirom, Iasi, 2005.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Hermeneutics by Paul ReddingTerry PinkardPaul Redding. Hegel’s Hermeneutics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi + 262. Cloth, $39.95. Paper, $16.95.Following on the heels of fruitful reception of Kant at work in the last several decades in English-speaking philosophy, one of the most productive lines of interpretation of [End Page 327] Hegel has tried to reconstruct Hegel’s thought in light of its relation to Kantianism. Paul Redding’s (...) new work carries this line further. As Redding sets matters up, Hegel builds explicitly on the unfinished “Copernican” move in Kant’s work, which, as the “Copernican” metaphor suggests, stresses the way in which our particular perspectives on the world must be understood as located within a set of conditions that, although not themselves experienced, are conditions of that experience. It calls, that is, for an investigation of how and whether “subjective” and “objective” points of view relate to each other. The “communicative” interpretation of Kant’s “Copernican” move sets up the Hegelian development of it: For one agent to be able to understand the claims of another’s experience, he must be able to conceive the other as an object-agent in the world and a subjective-agent that has a point of view on the world, and the other must likewise see him in the same way. Redding’s thesis is that Hegel appropriated the way that Kant, Fichte, and Schelling tried to provide such an account, and without falling into the pitfalls they did, developed a recognitive, “intersubjective,” theory of consciousness that successfully gives the proper account of how these two points of view are both necessary and relate to each other.Redding’s interpretation thus lays great weight on the short section of “master and servitude” in the Phenomenology as the key to the structure of all of Hegel’s thought. Each agent can recognize his own point of view only by virtue of recognizing the points of view of other agents, and this kind of recognition can arise when “an intention is common to subjects facing each other from opposed points of view” (111). The structure of recognition that emerges is, of course, quite complex and full of self-reflexive moments, but what emerges is Geist, spirit, the “I that is a We and the We that is an I,” which is not itself an entity having a point of view but a structure of self-conscious, mutually recognizing beings. Thus, at the basis of Hegel’s philosophy is a hermeneutical theory of how agents address and understand each other—that is, how they interpret each other’s acts, intentions, and expressions. Redding puts this interpretation to work in a short account of the progression of the Phenomenology, which he takes to be an account of the way in which the European community has historically failed to realize the kind of institutional and social structures of mutual recognition that would create the “conditions adequate for rational and free intentionality” (141) until modern times. The end of the Phenomenology—“absolute knowing”—is thus not the achieving of a “body of complete or final knowledge” but of the “(tragic) insight that particular and determinate bodies of knowledge are always conditioned and so perspectival” and thus calling for hermeneutical activities of interpretation (140).To make good on his account of the central status of “recognition” (and therefore of “hermeneutics”) to Hegel’s enterprise, Redding gives a short but quite insightful sketch of how Hegel’s notorious Science of Logic might be understood as a formalization of the logic of such recognitive practice, an account of how it is that agents can adopt these complex patterns of recognizing their own points of view as being recognized by others. Hegel’s Logic depends on the rejection of there being any “immediate” truths that can serve as absolute starting points or premises and from which we can then derive “mediated” true conclusions. There are no such “truths” outside of the circle of thought; this is, Redding argues, “characteristic of that ‘hermeneutic circle’ within [End Page 328] which, according to Heidegger and Gadamer, thought always moves,” namely, “a structure of reciprocal recognition... [as... (shrink)

Inter-cultural dialog is frequently treated as either unnecessary or else impossible. It is said to be unnecessary, because we all are the same or share the same ‘human nature'; it is claimed to be impossible because cultures seen as language games or forms or life are so different as to be radically incommensurable. The paper steers a course between absolute universalism and particularism by following the path of dialog and interrogation - where dialog does not mean empty chatter but (...) the exploration of the ‘otherness’ of interlocutors on the far side of either assimilation or exclusion. Such dialog is the heart of hermeneutics as formulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The paper explores the question whether hermeneutical interpretation can be transferred from textual readings to the domain of cross-cultural encounters. After discussing both the historical development and the basic meaning of contemporary hermeneutics, the paper draws attention to the intimate linkage between interpretive understanding and ‘application’, or ‘practical philosophy.’ Drawing on the insights of Gadamer and some more overtly political thinkers, the paper then shows the relevance of hermeneutics for cross-cultural studies, as an antidote to the looming ‘clash of civilizations.’ It turns to some writings by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to emphasize the necessary linkage between interactive dialog and concrete embodied engagement. Undercutting purely mentalist or ‘idealist’ misconstruals of dialog, this linkage shows the mutual compatibility between Gadamerian hermeneutics and existential phenomenology. Keywords: hermeneutics; dialogue; praxis; cross-cultural understanding; Gadamer; Merleau-Ponty (Published: 10 March 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i1.1937. (shrink)

IntroductionIn May 2006, the small group of doctoral students working on ecophilosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at K.U.Leuven invited the Dutch environmental philosopher Martin Drenthen to a workshop to discuss his writings on the concept of wilderness, its metaphysical and moral meaning, and the challenge social constructivism poses for ecophilosophy and environmental protection. Drenthen’s publications on these topics had already been the subject of intense discussions in the months preceding the workshop. His presentation on the workshop and the (...) three critical responses by Wim Bollen, Glenn Deliège, and Richard Kover are published here in a thoroughly revised form on the basis of further and ongoing discussions about the issues involved. Three further contributions to the discussion are added: one by Nathan Edward Kowalski, a young Canadian philosopher who studied in Leuven and wrote his as yet unpublished dissertation on “Evil in Nature,” a second one by Kingsley Goodwin who is currently writing a dissertation on deep ecology at University College in Dublin and, finally, my own unsystematic thoughts inspired by Martin Drenthen’s provocative and stimulating hermeneutics of our postmodern understanding of nature and wilderness, as well as the diverse critical responses to Drenthen’s views by the other contributors. I owe gratitude to all of them for enriching my own ecophilosophical thought and enlarging its horizon although as my fragmentary reflections show at the cost of yet greater uncertainty and more questions about the possibilities of arguing for a radical environmentalist position. Such a position would somehow connect or ground our moral obligation to preserve genuine non-human otherness, wild and free nature, in the non-human meaning of such nature and in our essential need to be in direct and concrete contact with that field of wild non-human meaning because we ourselves belong to nature, because we are not only and purely civilized but are also and most fundamentally wild and free. Three fundamental questions need to be distinguished: the question about our moral obligations regarding nature and its preservation, the metaphysical question about the nature of nature or the meaning of nature, and the question of the metaphysical grounding of our morals in general, and of our moral obligation regarding nature in particular, in the nature or meaning of nature. The complex intertwinement between these three questions is at the heart of Martin Drenthen’s reflections.The authors contributing to the present discussion approach the various issues from markedly different philosophical backgrounds and concerns: critical theory, anthropology, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deep ecology are all to some degree or other brought to bear on the question of what wilderness means for us, why we are fascinated by it and what it actually and in the first place is.Another interesting difference between the five respondents to Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy relates to the place from which they write: while the Canadians Richard Kover and Nathan Edward Kowalski have wilderness of some sort still close at hand, the Belgians Wim Bollen and Glenn Deliège write from a place which has been thoroughly domesticated, cultivated, and industrialised for a long time. Martin Drenthen himself, of course, writes from the same kind of place as these last two, which explains why he only refers to the wilderness that he has read about in novels, seen in movies, or experienced as recreated in the reserves of the Netherlands. The Irish Kingsley Goodwin writes perhaps from a third, intermediate place that is not wild anymore but still much more natural than Belgium or the Netherlands are.The differences in philosophical approach and concern combined with the difference of place generate a rich tapestry of perspectives and voices wrestling with the fundamental questions of our perceived homelessness and alienation from nature, our cultural discontent, our longing for and need for radical alterity, of immanence and transcendence, of who we are and where we belong, and more concretely of whether there is more to ground our efforts to preserve nature than enlightened self-interest and subjective preference. Martin Drenthen deserves praise for inaugurating this fruitful discussion with his intriguing and highly paradoxical effort to hybridize a postmodern deconstruction of the idea and ideal of wilderness as unspoilt and true nature on the one hand with a new metaphysics of wilderness on the other. Arne Naess, who is generally regarded as the founding father of deep ecology, pointed out the positive and stimulating role that vagueness in the expression of ideas can play in political and philosophical debate. Such general and vague but highly suggestive expressions as ‘all life is one’ are not empty at all, as is often claimed; they are rather full of possibilities of ‘precisation’ and differentiation. Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy is certainly not vague to the degree of ‘all life is one,’ but his expositions are similarly pregnant with a wealth of further questions, precisations, distinctions, and conceptual clarifications. Good examples of different kinds are to be found in the contributions of Nathan Edward Kowalski and Richard Kover. Kowalski points out that Drenthen’s notions of culture and wilderness need to be made more precise by distinguishing them from the notions of civilization and wildness such that wild cultures become a conceptual possibility. Richard Kover takes the lead from Drenthen’s question about the reason for our postmodern fascination for wilderness to confront it with our primordial fascination in terms of the dependence in the evolution of our subjectivity and our consciousness on the focused perceptual attention on wild forms.Glenn Deliège situates Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy in its original context of the Dutch debate on the preservation of nature, in particular on the new wilderness paradigm. According to this paradigm, the nature to be preserved should be true and pure, truly natural and wild nature, that is nature outside of and free from the cultivating and domesticating influence of humans. In the Netherlands, however, such nature no longer exists; it can only be preserved after it has first been artificially recreated. Deliège gives an informative summary account of the highly charged three-cornered debate between the adepts of this wilderness-paradigm, the proponents of the more traditional form of conservation of remnants of the typical European landscapes created by pre-industrial farming practices and the modern technocratic functionalists. This debate makes obvious that there are quite different views of the nature of nature and its value. Enter social constructivism: the contested nature of nature is nothing more than a social construct, an idea in a collective mind. The contestation itself is a struggle for authority and power between different such social constructs, any claim to scientific objectivity and objective truth for one’s image of nature is an arrogation of a truth which doesn’t exist and is potentially oppressive by silencing other views. Nature then is up for the grabs of politics, political negotiation, and compromise between various interest groups who all want to get some benefit from nature, some use-value.The problem with Drenthen’s effort to articulate a normative concept of nature which cannot be deconstructed in this way is the extreme formality and emptiness of his metaphysical concept of wilderness as that which is always ‘beyond’, always ‘more’ and which can never be exhausted by any image and construction of nature. Any more concrete determination is mere appearance; the thing in itself is a border concept of that which in fact cannot be grasped conceptually. Glenn Deliège is critical of this formality and emptiness from which it will be impossible to derive any concrete guidance for our conservation practices. He then goes on to defend the Arcadian tradition of our appreciation of nature as giving us a historically well-grounded orientation for those practices. Of course that Arcadian tradition is obviously a cultural construction but that doesn’t make it completely arbitrary and contingent since it is itself ultimately grounded in and open to modification by our concrete sensuous experiences of nature.Deliège here raises the very important issue of the relation between our concrete perceptual and bodily experiences in and with nature and our concepts and metaphysical images of nature. Drenthen himself approaches this issue from the hermeneutical perspective of our need to make sense of our experiences and to articulate their meaning. His confrontation with social constructivism and his effort to salvage something from its relativizing acid lead him, however, into the direction of a highly abstract and empty concept of wilderness.Richard Kover shows that perception is, indeed, the key to a radical critique of social constructivism. He does this with the help of the ecological anthropology of Paul Shepard, the structuralist anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It needs to be said here that Kover takes his leave from an unpublished paper by Martin Drenthen with the title “How to appropriate wilderness appropriately?” – the paper is accessible though on Drenthen’s web-site - in which Drenthen comments and reflects upon three contemporary wilderness-tales, one of them being Werner Herzog’s much-discussed documentary on Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist drop-out who lived thirteen summers among wild grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness before being killed together with his girlfriend by a grizzly bear.Kover tries to show that we are not imprisoned in the mirror-cabinet of our mind or of our human sociality. To make his case, he starts from Paul Shepard’s thoughtful observation that the evolutionary emergence of the mind did not remove us from the natural world but actually connected us deeper with it. Through our mind we evolved more fully into it because our mind is primordially in our senses and in the ability to articulate a perceptual world. The natural world in the form of the system of natural species and their relations is the primary model for perceptual discriminations, for the fundamental discovery of order with its twin-aspects of distinction and discontinuity on the one side and relations and continuity on the other side. Our cognition is essentially perceptually based, our subjectivity is primordially informed by our inherence in the sensible world. Perceptual cognition is inherently intentional and relational, it is not an autonomous mental construction, it is rather in the world and informed by that which is perceived. The other is always intertwined with the subject. We are always already hooked up with the world, with the others, before we start reflecting, thinking, and conceptualizing. This is one of the major themes in Shepard’s work: what this insight means with regard to our relations to non-human otherness, in particular to our perceptual encounter with wild animals. In our encounter with non-human otherness, we are confronted with an essentially ambiguous sense of both affinity and disjuncture. Wild animals demonstrate to us that we are not homeless or alien to this world, that we fundamentally belong to it and are part of it. Their difference, however, shows us that there are different perspectives and ways of being in the world. “Thus the encounter with non-human others inform humans that we are both of the world and simultaneously not the world and there are horizons of significance beyond our own perspective.”Nathan Edward Kowalski comes to a similar conclusion when he situates our morality in the larger moral order of wild nature. According to Kowalski it is indeed a moral order though not our own, an Other to our morality but not simply a negative one. It is, as Drenthen says, a highly paradoxical amoral morality. But what can it mean to speak of morality here? For Kowalski it means that the issue is not merely the theoretical recognition and acknowledgment of axiological transcendence, of non-human values out there, but whether we will appropriately conform to and comport ourselves towards that axiological transcendence so that we can find a human homeland in wild nature instead of turning it into a wasteland. The question then is, how to fit our own human morality into this larger order and greater reality, to subordinate it to that greater reality as a part of it and encompassed but not denied by it so that we can be moral and natural at the same time, tender carnivores hunting the sacred game. Indigenous people follow a moral protocol in their relationship with non-human others which acknowledge and respects their autonomy, their alterity, and the sacred mystery of their different ways of being. They are not befriended but some of them are hunted and eaten – as an exchange in the gift-economy of nature.The problem of the homelessness and alienation from nature is discussed by Wim Bollen from the radically different vantage point of critical theory. In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the human story unfolds as a tragic effort to liberate ourselves from nature and to become fully human through rational control when in the end this effort turns against ourselves and instead of liberation and human flourishing we get social domination and repression of our natural needs. The frustrations and mutilations imposed upon us by a repressive civilization give rise to the regressive desire for a return to a natural existence. Referring to the myth of Odysseus and Circe as interpreted by Adorno and Horkheimer, Wim Bollen equates such a natural existence with animal life. In the light of contemporary knowledge about primitive existence, however, this equation is highly problematic. Palaeolithic foragers were already fully human in all respects. A life without civilization need not be an animal-existence.According to Adorno/Horkheimer, our subjectivity and autonomy have to be wrested from animal-nature through an exertive struggle that cannot but proceed by a threefold strategy of domination: the domination of non-human otherness, of human others, and of our own inner nature. The siren song of nature consists in the temptation to give up that struggle for the promise of an unreflective, non-alienated natural existence without toil.When Odysseus’ men give in to Circe’s seduction they are, however, not transformed into wild animals but into swine. According to Bollen this signifies that we cannot re-wild ourselves, that we remain imprisoned in civilization, either as master-subjects or as domesticated animals. Bollen, by the way, like Drenthen, does not distinguish conceptually between civilization and culture. Since re-wilding for Bollen means the impossibility of returning to animal-existence, which is actually the impossibility of becoming another species since biologically we are animals already, to be imprisoned in civilisation means nothing else than to be imprisoned in our humanity. The fact that we cannot become wild animals again – according to Paul Shepard, however, we are still wild animals – is indeed, as Bollen stresses, a trivial form of alienation. A more meaningful concept of alienation which can be put to critical use must refer to a culturally and historically determined frustration and deficit inside the cultural order that is to be overcome not by an impossible regression but by progressive politics leading beyond the three intertwined forms of domination. Not back to nature but forward towards a reconciliation of culture with nature! Such a reconciliation would neither collapse culture into the immanence of nature nor submerge nature into the transcendence of culture. According with the three forms of domination it would be a three-dimensional form of reconciliation.Odysseus’ men did not got what they thought were promised them: the complete liberation from the burden of being autonomous subjects, of being civilized, but they got something worthwhile, namely a certain from of pleasure, a limited and provisional relief and escape. Bollen sees a critical potential in these piggish pleasures after all and consequently even in the siren song of nature since these pleasures were only experienced because Odysseus’ men gave in to it. But one has to give in to this siren song critically if it is to unfold its liberating potential. The problem with pleasure though in bourgeois society is that it is necessarily betrayed, instrumentalized and sold.Kingsley Goodwin’s paper starts by defending deep ecology against the charge of asserting a naïve and dogmatic metaphysics of nature. For convenience sake, but not quite unproblematically, he identifies deep ecology with the environmental thought of Arne Naess. A metaphysics of nature for Naess is always part of a personal worldview. Worldviews which are partly inspired by ecology Naess calls ecosophies. Naess always stresses the personal character of such a worldview and the irreducible plurality of them. It used to be a common misunderstanding of the platform of deep ecology which Naess conceived together with George Sessions that it expressed in a condensed form the metaphysical beliefs of deep ecology. Naess’ intention, however, was to try to articulate in a general fashion the basic viewpoints on which the supporters of the deep ecology movement agreed. It would be possible then to derive these viewpoints from quite different worldviews. In light of this, I think, that Goodwin’s characterisation of the platform as “pragmatic and activist” is not quite appropriate.Goodwin goes on to compare Drenthen’s conception of wilderness and wildness with the similar position developed by Neil Evernden in his book The Social Creation of Nature. He like Naess in his personal ecosophy stresses the crucial role of perceptual experience of wild otherness to find an antidote to the relativity and contingency of our interpretations of nature. Evernden refers to studies on child development to argue for a non-dualistic and relational conception of the self, similar to Naess’ relational ontology. According to Goodwin, Drenthen, in spite of his hermeneutical approach remains too much indebted to the Western subject/object-dualism. The object, in this case wild nature, is pure otherness.With regard to a compost heap, Goodwin shows that we are not separated from nature by an inseparable gulf, that nature is close at hand, and that we can experience and explore it, appreciate the complex play of identity and difference it consists of, the exchanges and transformations and that we can identify with the organisms involved in these exchanges.*The proceeding remarks only highlight some of the prominent themes and considerations in the various contributions to this topical issue of Ethical Perspectives. Hopefully the reader will feel invited and enticed to read the articles themselves, starting, preferably of course, with the essay by Martin Drenthen, who sparked off this lively discussion on the moral meaning of wild nature. I am honoured and pleased to be able to introduce these rich explorations by such talented young environmental philosophers who are eager to develop environmental philosophy further and lead it into new directions. They all have to wrestle with and find answers to the challenge postmodern deconstruction and social constructivism pose for environmental philosophy. In the face of that challenge, it is even more difficult than it already was to provide solid and convincing arguments for the defence of wild and free nature beyond merely pragmatic arguments in terms of its utilitarian value for us. The reason for that defence is not clear-cut and proves to be just as evasive as the moral meaning of nature itself. But neither that reason nor that meaning are mere phantoms and mirages that vanish when we approach them and try to grasp them. They are more substantial, even if they will never have the solidity of a mathematical proof or a scientific measurement. Their locale is the lifeworld which from the point of view of scientific and logical precision and clarity is a messy place where subject and object, reason and heart, fact and value, experience and thought and, yes, nature and culture cannot be clearly separated. This has important consequences for environmental philosophy and its methodology. Conceptual analysis and logical argumentation have to become sensitive to the richness of experience in the lifeworld and to the diverse efforts of its articulation: i.e., they have to open themselves up and maybe even to subordinate themselves to phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. For me personally this is one of the most important conclusions I draw from the discussion presented here. (shrink)

Reading fiction from high and low culture together, Fiction, Crime, and Empire skillfully sheds light on how crime fiction responded to the British and American experiences of empire, and how forms such as the detective novel, spy thrillers, and conspiracy fiction articulate powerful cultural responses to imperialism. Poe's Dupin stories, for example, are seen as embodying a highly critical vision of the social forces that were then transforming the United States into a modern, democratic industrialized nation; a century (...) later, Le Carré employs the conventions of espionage fiction to critique the exhausted and morally compromised values of British imperialism. By exploring these works through the organizing figure of crime during and after the age of high imperialism, Thompson challenges and modifies commonplace definitions of modernism, postmodernism, and popular or mass culture. (shrink)

Marius Jucan, Singuratatea salvata. O încercare asupra operei lui Henry David Thoreau din perspectiva modernitatii americane Editura Fundatiei pentru Studii Europene, Cluj Napoca, 2001.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange by Helen PalmerTrevor Norris (bio)Helen Palmer, Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 214 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-3414-0Helen palmer is senior lecturer in English literature and creative writing at Kingston University in London and the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (2014). Her research examines queer theory, performance, literary modernism, gender, aesthetics, and feminist and Afrofuturist (...) fiction. Queer Defamiliarisation explores these ideas and also includes part of Palmer’s literary creative response to James Joyce. The project here is an inquiry into reading, thinking, writing, and pleasure and considers how language can change us when we experience the relationship between naming and the performance of identity as a material boundary: the places where our bodies, behavior, and language are subject to violence in gendered, sexualized, and racialized forms. Palmer also suggests how our own and others’ experiences of violence might be bound up with an aesthetics of linguistic and formal complexity, and she reimagines the difficulty of naming for violently excluded identities by reviewing a range of complex experimental and avant-garde literary works in which new identities can emerge. Showing us how we might understand the materiality of bodies, sense making, and desire in emancipa-tory ways, Palmer attunes us to a phenomenology of reading in which we [End Page 217] recognize how argument undergoes metamorphosis by always being a hybrid of theory, criticism, cultural history, appropriation, memoir, and experimental form. Palmer’s wide-ranging arguments speak about the porosity and mutual embeddedness of our selves, our language, our bodies and environments, and the queer processes of world creation that act on and emerge from these things. Placing her work with other texts that rethink gender, personhood and ecology through new materialisms is productive, therefore, and readers might find value in looking at Queer Defamiliarisation alongside Donna Haraway’s (2016) Staying with the Trouble, Timothy Morton’s (2019)Humankind, and Rebecca Tamás’s (2020) Strangers inasmuch as they think through the ethics and emergence of relatedness and examine what it means to play, be alongside, care for, and nurture other beings and their worlds. Palmer’s project stays with the kind of “serious and... lively” trouble that allows “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles” (Haraway 2016, 4).The fertile landscape is mapped out in three introductions whose themes are explored in four chapters. Palmer transforms the early-twentieth-century Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization as literary and aesthetic device, the “paradoxical process that... restores sensations to things through a [linguistic] distancing that is also a re-proximation, an approximation, a touching” (9), by reading early- to mid-twentieth-century literary and cultural theorists such as Shklovsky, Brecht, and Jakobson through the ideas of contemporary queer, feminist, and decolonial scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, and Vicki Kirby. She questions how the estrangement of naming operates for those whose bodies are not normatively gendered, racialized, and sexualized in relation to dominant forms of representation and power and explores concerns with and for queer, trans, decolonial, and feminist aesthetics. Throughout, she encourages us to think of the strangeness of language in relation to an ethics and an erotics of radical sympathy with the stranger because it is in the “continuous movement and continual transformation” (13) of naming, and categories of naming, that an emancipatory ethics can be found. This is a timely intervention by Palmer given current anxieties around naming gender and sex, and her argument seeks to move beyond “unhelpful binaries” to acknowledge the “infinite variations and permutations of existence and experience” (14).Palmer productively combines Sara Ahmed’s concept of disorientation from Queer Phenomenology (2006) with the psycholinguistic registers of Jakobson’s “contiguity and displacement” to suggest that queer defamiliarization is a performance of language and naming that “cleaves through and between sameness and difference,” “knocking signifiers loose and ungrounding bodies,” leading to “perceptual shifts and corporeal responses” that can “materially en-gender newness” (Palmer 17). From the start of the section “Spectaxa” (152), Palmer foregrounds the materiality of her text in increasingly modernistic excess to illustrate what we have been reading and... (shrink)

The aim of this text is to reconstruct the meanings of the concept of hermeneutical truth, as it has been defined and explained in the main projects of modern hermeneutics (Dannhauer, Chladenius, Meier, Schleiermacher, Fr. Schlegel). I will explore the epistemological side of this concept, different from its meaning in hermeneutic ontology. Understood as correctness by modern hermeneutics, truth has been related to the authorial intention. The thesis I am arguing is that the meanings of hermeneutical truth and, related (...) to them, the modern theories of authorial intention differ according to the metaphysical presuppositions that define the thought paradigms of modernity (Cartesianism, Kantianism, Romanticism and German Idealism): the centrality and activism of the self, the rationality of the self, the dependence of knowledge on the ideal of method, the discovery of the unconscious. Some modern hermeneutical theories express the tensions between these philosophical paradigms. However, I will argue that the authorial intention remains a limit of interpretation that prevents the risks of arbitrariness and hermeneutic relativism. Translated by Mariana Constantinescu. (shrink)

This article is a study of the survival of scribal culture in nineteenth-century Spain in the form of the so-called ‘memory books’ (libros de memorias). I analyse their relationship with the educational developments of the period, as well as the material characteristics and the content of these texts, in order to define their typical features. These texts were the products of hybrid writing practices, in the sense that several elements were frequently superimposed on one another: economic news, personal, family and (...) social events and even historical details. Hence the similarity between the memory books and other genres such as account books (libros de cuentas) and family books (libros de familia). Lastly, I will examine some nineteenth-century examples as epigones of a writing genre which had its origins in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period. “One morning, while tidying up the bedroom, Rosa opened the drawer in the trunk where Cholo kept his papers. There she found the papers about the property and, in a corner, together with the Family Book and the social security booklet, the papers from the bank […]. And she was about to put it away when it occurred to her to take off the elastic band around the big folder which Cholo had kept from his time in Switzerland. There were things, names and so on that she didn’t understand, but in the middle there were also some of the cards she had sent from Aran.”1. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Defending a Phenomenological–Behavioral Perspective: Culture, Behavior, and ExperienceMarino Pérez-Álvarez (bio), José M. García-Montes (bio), Adolfo J. Cangas (bio), and Louis A. Sass (bio)KeywordsBehavior, contextual phenomenology, culture, experienceWe should like to express our sincere thanks to all the authors for their commentaries on our articles. Given the restrictions of space (a limitation they too had to contend with), we can only respond to a few aspects of their interesting (...) remarks. We shall reply of course on the basis of our own approach—an approach that sets out to integrate culture, behavior, and experience, and that might be termed contextual phenomenology, phenomenological behaviorism, or perhaps most accurately (albeit more awkwardly), the phenomenological–behavioral perspective.In her commentary, Ibáñez-Guerra (2008), referring to the target articles “Phenomenology and behaviorism” (Pérez-Álvarez, Sass, and Cangas 2008) and “The role of superstition in psychopathology” (García-Montes et al. 2008), wonders whether our maintaining of the spirit of Skinner, as well as our recourse to phenomenology, might not themselves represent forms of superstitious behavior. She points out that it is not always a good idea to put new wine in old barrels. For her, the new wine and new barrels would be represented by social constructivism, of which she is reminded by some aspects of our work. But in making her own case, Ibáñez-Guerra (2008) reveals certain common prejudices concerning behaviorism, prejudices that have apparently persisted even after reading our article. Thus, for example, she does not see operant behavior as incorporating intentionality (what, in the target article, is presented in terms of final causality), because she assumes that intentionality would necessarily imply a mentalist and dualist notion involving a supposed internal mental entity that causes behavior. Skinner (1974) himself noted and rejected this very assumption in a passage that clearly distinguishes his own approach from what he calls a “stimulus-response formula”: “Possibly no charge,” he wrote,is more often leveled against behaviorism or a science of behavior than that it cannot deal with purpose or intention. A stimulus-response formula has no answer, but operant behavior is the very field of purpose and [End Page 281] intention. By its nature it is directed toward the future: a person acts in order that something will happen, and the order is temporal.(pp. 55–6)The place Skinner gives to intentionality and purpose is elaborated in our target article.Furthermore, Ibáñez-Guerra (2008) assumes that, on methodological grounds, Skinner rejects all that is not observable, or at least that cannot be operationalized. This, however, is simply incorrect, at least as regards Skinner’s radical behaviorism. As the reader may recall, radical (as opposed to methodological) behaviorism is neither operationalist nor does it reject private or subjective events because of their unobservability. Indeed, Skinner specifically acknowledges that such events are in fact observable—at least for one person: the subject him- or herself. The question for Skinner is to understand how the part of the world that is only observable and experiential for oneself is constructed or formed. In the end, it turns out that radical behaviorism is more radical, in the Aristotelian ontological sense (see Pérez-Alvarez, Sass, and García-Montes 2008), than post-modern constructionism. Indeed, as we remarked, radical behaviorism can still surprise us today. Similarly, phenomenology is starting to be missed in the clinical context (Andreasen 2007). We believe that radical behaviorism and phenomenology, mutually readjusted, are in fact excellent wines for the times we live in—if only we knew how to appreciate them.In their commentary on “Phenomenology and behaviorism: A mutual readjustment,” Fletcher and Hayes (2008) argue that the philosophy and theory of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)/Relational Frame Theory (RFT) already contain the salutary aspects of phenomenology that we highlight in our target article. Their insistence on reducing the affinities we find between phenomenology and behaviorism to ACT/RFT consists, in our view, in a scientific–technical argument that is more scientistic than strictly philosophical in nature. Their insistence on the scientific–technical argument itself implies an unclarified philosophical assumption. On what grounds do experimental data constitute the last word? Has... (shrink)

This article offers a critique and reformulation of the concept of empathy as it is currently used in the context of medicine and medical care. My argument is three pronged. First, that the instrumentalised notion of empathy that has been common within medicine erases the term’s rich epistemological history as a special form of understanding, even a vehicle of social inquiry, and has instead substituted an account unsustainably structured according to the polarisations of modernity. I suggest that understanding empathy by (...) examining its origins within the phenomenological tradition, as a mode of intersubjective understanding, offers a different and profitable approach. Secondly, I argue that the appropriation of empathy in medicine means that, ironically, empathy can function as a technique of pastoral power, in which virtue, knowledge and authority remain with the doctor. And thirdly, empathy is in danger of being resourced as a substitute for equity and funding within health systems. I conclude however with hope for the productive possibilities for empathy. (shrink)

In this book, T. L. Short places the notorious difficulties of Peirce's important writings in a more productive light, arguing that he wrote philosophy as a scientist, by framing conjectures intended to be refined or superseded in the inquiries they initiate. He argues also that Peirce held that the methods and metaphysics of modern science are amended as inquiry progresses, making metaphysics a branch of empirical knowledge. Additionally, Short shows that Peirce's scientific work expanded empiricism on empirical grounds, grounding his (...) phenomenology and subverting the fact/value dichotomy, and that he understood statistical explanations in nineteenth-century science as reintroducing the idea of final causation, now made empirical. Those innovations underlie Peirce's late ideas of a normative science and of philosophy as a branch of science. Short's rich and original study shows us how to read Peirce's writings and why they are worth reading. (shrink)

In _René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis_, Scott Cowdell provides the first systematic interpretation of René Girard’s controversial approach to secular modernity. Cowdell identifies the scope, development, and implications of Girard’s thought, the centrality of Christ in Girard's thinking, and, in particular, Girard's distinctive take on the uniqueness and finality of Christ in terms of his impact on Western culture. In Girard’s singular vision, according to Cowdell, secular modernity has emerged thanks to the Bible’s exposure of the (...) cathartic violence that is at the root of religious prohibitions, myths, and rituals. In the literature, the psychology, and most recently the military history of modernity, Girard discerns a consistent slide into an apocalypse that challenges modern ideas of romanticism, individualism, and progressivism._ In the first three chapters, Cowdell examines the three elements of Girard’s basic intellectual vision and brings this vision to a constructive interpretation of “secularization” and “modernity,” as these terms are understood in the broadest sense today. Chapter 4 focuses on modern institutions, chiefly the nation state and the market, that function to restrain the outbreak of violence. And finally, Cowdell discusses the apocalyptic dimension of Girard's theory in relation to modern warfare and terrorism. Here, Cowdell engages with the most recent writings of Girard and applies them to further conversations in cultural theology, political science, and philosophy. Cowdell takes up and extends Girard’s own warning concerning an alternative to a future apocalypse: “What sort of conversion must humans undergo, before it is too late?” "Scott Cowdell's book is the first comprehensive study of modernity and secularity in René Girard's thought. Cowdell brings Girard's theory into a fruitful dialogue with leading approaches on secularization like those of Max Weber, Hans Blumenberg, Peter Berger, and Charles Taylor. Scholars and students of theology, philosophy, and sociology will benefit from this wide-ranging overview of the relationship between religion, modernity, and secularization." — Wolfgang Palaver, Institute of Systematic Theology, University of Innsbruck __ "In a stunning analysis, Cowdell shows that Girard’s sustained intellectual pursuit, which began in the 1960s with his mimetic analysis of modern realist fiction, has always been about the religiosity of the modern and postmodern social condition, even when it has dealt explicitly with the religious origins of antique culture. Cowdell demonstrates the 'highly explanatory and predictive' quality of Girard’s cultural anthropology, within which the 'secular' does not escape the 'religious.' This is a powerful book." — Ann W. Astell, University of Notre Dame __ "Scott Cowdell is one of the most interesting theological voices of his generation. The themes in Cowdell's work are always cosmic and vast in scope. This is a remarkable reading of our contemporary situation through the lens of René Girard. Accurate, informed, and illuminating, Cowdell has written a fabulous book. For the person needing a way into Girard and for the person who is already using Girard's work, Cowdell brings out the implications of Girard for the moment in which we live. An absolutely essential addition to your personal library." — The Very Rev Dr. Ian Markham, Virginia Theological Seminary_. (shrink)

This article discusses how everyday speech was mediated in early modern England: how speech was registered and remediated through various cultural techniques making it recognizable as a distinct linguistic medium and how these processes intersected with literary writing. A contribution to the study of the early modern English mediascape and its literary ramifications, this essay is also an effort to think historically about media change and literary transformation both as they happen and as they become visible over time. In (...) what follows, I trace the relationship between speech and the cultural techniques that engage with speech as the medium of everyday face-to-face interaction. Although my question is ultimately about speech, not poetry, and although the larger question I am interested in is not about artistic production but about media and cultural techniques more broadly, literary—poetic and especially dramatic—writing is nevertheless central to my essay. My argument grows out of the insights of twentieth-century literary criticism, whose observations about the relationship between speech and writing in 1600 were recognizably informed by the discourse network of their own moment and by their own concerns with modernity and its origins. So even as I am making an argument about the media constellation of a particular moment (an argument that could perhaps be described as crudely historicist), I am also curious about how the features of that moment became visible under different historical conditions or were imprinted by different media constellations and also how the defamiliarizing effect of the new may have made the past look familiar. (shrink)

A good phenomenological theory must be able to account equally well for our experiences of veridical perception and hallucination, for our thoughts about universities, colors, numbers, mythical figures and more. For all of these are characteristic mental acts, and a theory of intentionality should be a theory of conscious acts in general, not just of consciousness of a specific kind of thing or of a specific kind of consciousness. In so far as phenomenology purports to be a general study (...) of intentional acts of consciousness, it must be able to account for acts with all kinds of objects and with all kinds of thetic character. Any limitation of these features puts the theory in danger of being an explanation of only some kinds of mental act, and of mis-characterizing the nature of intentionality in general. (shrink)

Brand begins his book with a statement of the philosophical and cultural crisis of contemporary life, a crisis brought about by science. The idealizing methods and technology of contemporary science lead to a loss of self-understanding, and to a replacement of ordinary lived experience by scientific constructs; science in its turn has lost its human and philosophical meaning. An exploration of the life-world that provides the basis for science may help remedy this situation. Brand then explores the theme of (...) a concrete, lived world in Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In these sections he examines themes appropriate to each author: essence, intuition, evidence and intentionality in Husserl; hermeneutics, world, sensibility and authenticity in Heidegger; en soi, pour soi, and negativity in Sartre; the body, science, and dialectics in Merleau-Ponty. These are not just introductory analyses; in each case Brand comes to terms with major interpretations and critics, and is able to show the unity of philosophic inspiration behind each man. In the second section of the book he presents his own analysis of the life-world. He begins with a long study of the nature of philosophical reflection. This includes a treatment of the formal process of distinguishing and reuniting into wholes. He analyzes conceptualization, the experience of wonder, meaning and expression, metaphor, communication, sensibility and the body. Action, value, need, choice, scarcity, and motives are among the themes treated next, and also social dimensions like the family, authority, conflict and friends. Finally he examines private dimensions like personal mythos, one's personal career, sex, eros and love, and the inner life. Throughout these pages Brand uses not only the four philosophers analyzed in Part One, but also such figures as Gadamer, Derrida, Habermas, Wittgenstein, and many others. His writing is a guide not only to philosophical problems, but also to vast areas of current literature; long quotations abound. The original problem of the life-world comes from Husserl, but Brand is especially aware of the dimension of action, choice and work, so his interpretation of the life-world is able to illuminate aspects that Husserl touched only lightly. Brand's independent mind is able to cut across philosophical schools and uncover common elements in them, such as his excellent comparison of Wittgenstein and phenomenology on the irreducible character of insight as the beginning of philosophy. He considers the life-world as not the final ground of experience; rather the process of distinguishing is more basic, and is the final term beyond which we cannot move. Brand claims Husserl does not go beyond the life-world to this, and that only the late Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein appreciate it; but are not Husserl's doctrines of parts and wholes and empty and filled intentions a treatment of the process of distinguishing and identifying? And don't these themes take Husserl beyond the life-world? The wide range and multitudinous sources of this book make exhaustive treatment of each area impossible, and on some points Brand merely gives sketches of what might be done. Other themes are very thoroughly analyzed, and all sections are interesting and provocative. This book should be not only an important contribution to phenomenology, but also one of the most helpful volumes in the philosophical discussions of the years to come.--R. S. (shrink)

This carefully crafted volume concludes the series of works that began with Cultural Thematics. Seung's primary aim is to go beyond the malaise of post-New Critical studies and to reinstate the centrality of contextual understanding in the interpretation of the structure and meaning of a text. In his introductory discussion of "Text and Context" the author undermines the claims of the objectivity of a text, textual solipsism and textual agnosticism in a manner that recalls the previous arguments in philosophy (...) concerning our knowledge of the external world. Starting with an analysis of textual indeterminacy, Seung ranges over a variety of relevant conceptions of the interpretation of a text, touching upon the works of E. D. Hirsch, Schleiermacher, Cleanth Brooks, Dilthey, Gadamer, and others. In a fairly technical chapter, "Semantics and Pragmatics," the distinctions between formal semantics and informal pragmatics are clearly discussed. An analysis of the pragmatic use of language leads to detailed and informative discussions of pragmatic norms, pragmatic functions, and the relevance of authorial intention for an understanding of a given text. Simplifying Seung's lucid and disciplined arguments, it is shown that a proper understanding of a text requires a grasp of the holistic culture in which it is presented, as well as an understanding of regnant cultural themes. Enriched by interpretations of the Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, the Aeneid, Dante's Commedia, and other literary works, Seung displays the art of contextual interpretation in accordance with his own principles. Of special interest is the presentation of the importance of textual coherence for significant textual interpretations. The various analyses of the role of thematics in the understanding of literature in historical context lead to sympathetic appraisals of Gadamer's hermeneutic program and a brief defence of Gadamer against the charge of falling into an historicist relativity. Finally, Seung concludes his illuminating study with a sketch of a cultural morphology that resembles, in embryo, Hegel's phenomenology of culture. This is no accident, insofar as Seung presents, in his concluding outline of the interaction of cultural themes, an admitted variation on Hegel's dialectical theme. By even finding a place for the "existential dimension of thematic dialectic," the author manages to negate and preserve the solipsism of the reader and give recognition virtually to every relevant aspect of a complex hermeneutic process.--G. J. Stack, SUNY College at Brockport. (shrink)

I argue that imagination has an inherently paradoxical structure: it enables one to flee one’s socio-cultural reality and to constitute one’s socio-cultural world. I maintain that most philosophical accounts of the imagination leave this paradox unexplored. I further contend that Paul Ricoeur is the only thinker to have addressed this paradox explicitly. According to Ricoeur, to resolve this paradox, one needs to recognize language as the origin of productive imagination. This paper explores Ricoeur’s solution by offering a detailed (...) study of reproductive and productive imagination in the framework of poetic imagination. My analysis subjects Ricoeur’s distinction between reproductive and productive imagination to a critique that relies upon the principles of classical phenomenology. According to my central thesis, the imaginative powers of language are themselves rooted in perception. This thesis broadens the scope and significance of Ricoeur’s solution by enabling one to resolve the paradox of imagination not only at the level of language-based imagination, but also at the level of dreams and daydreaming as well as at the level of non-language based art. No less significantly, this thesis enables one to open a fresh dialogue between phenomenology and hermeneutics. (shrink)

Modern tradition takes a person to be a rational (and moral) agent, namely an agent capable of acting on the basis of reasons – often desire-independent reasons, and particularly moral reasons. So, agency and freedom are involved in the definition of personhood. But what about the embodiment of persons? What about their rootedness in the particular circumstances of a human life – time, space, community of origin, material, and axiological culture? What about the individual identity of persons, their irreducible individuality? (...) The phenomenological notion of intentionality has a widely neglected richness of content, making it a key conceptual tool, capable of explaining not only consciousness but also rational agency, that is personhood, right from the level of the most basic and embodied instances of consciousness: perception, emotion, and spontaneous action. These should be considered as acts, rather than as states, and the discussion of the specific intentionality of these acts and their motivational relations purports to be an original contribution to a genetic phenomenology of embodied, individualized personhood and rational agency. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of collective intentionality and shows its relevance when we seek to understand public management. Social ontology – particularly its leading concept, collective intentionality – provides critical insights into public organisations. The paper sets out the some of the epistemological limitations of cultural theories and takes as its example of these the group-grid theory of Douglas and Hood. It then draws upon Brentano, Husserl and Searle to show the ontological character of public management. Modern public (...) institutions – such as advisory organisations and service delivery agencies, including schools and universities – are expressions of human collective intentionality. The central concept within these institutions, as a phenomenology reveals, is cooperation. Public institutions are natural structures that emerge from our evolutionary ancestry as cooperative animals and enduringly display all the features of that ancestry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUSSERL ON GALILEO'S INTENTIONAI,ITY 1JHE PROBLEM OF THE compatibility between pheomenology and history is the unique problem characterizing Edmund Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.1 Husserl attempts to resolve the pvoblem by directly investigating the crisis of the modern sciences-a crisis which he claims begins with Galileo. The aim of this essay is to evaluate critically Husserl's assessment of Galileo as the originator of the (...) crisis. I hope to show that, given Husserl's own demands for the proper historico-phenomenological investigation of the crisis, his conclusions about Galileo are not justified. This will be accomplished, in part, by using some of the work on Galileo done by William A. Wallace, 0.P. THE "ORIGIN" OF THE CRISIS Husserl describes the crisis of European sciences in terms of a teleological movement. The telos began with the radical change effected by the ancient Greeks in their recognition that reason is essential to humanity, and that reason is the entelechy of humanity.2 For the Greeks, one of the exigencies of reason is a universal knowledge of what is, in which truth in itself, episteme, is attainable. The telic character of reason is revealed in the fact that reason in its philosophical mode continually moves from latent to manifest reason beginning with the Greeks. Husserl writes: "... the telos... was inborn in 1 Translated, with an introduction, by David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) ; abbreviation: Orisis. 2 See Carr's Introduction p. xxxviii to the Orisis for a discussion of the sense in which the Greeks' change was a radical one. 680 HUSSERL ON GALILEO'S INTENTIONALITY 681 European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy-that of humanity which seeks to exist, and is only possible, through philosophical reason, moving endlessly from latent to manifest reason and forever seeking its own norms through this, its truth and genuine human nature..." 3 The search for a universal knowledge initially had a " na'ive obviousness " which from the very beginning was not immune to transformations that eventually would increase and achieve greater and greater sophistication. For Husserl, the transformations are brought about by skepticism, which, in its denial of the presence of reason in " the factually experienced world," finally reaches the point where "... the deepest essential interrelation between reason and what is in general, the enigma of all enigmas, has to become the actual theme of inquiry." 4 This inquiry ought to be the task for contemporary philosophy. Such a task has been recognized to a certain extent beginning with Hume and on through Kant and beyond. What Hume and Kant attempted with regard to the Renaissance renewal of the ancient Greek ideal of a universal philosophy, Husserl prescribes in a more radical way for Hume and Kant themselves, indeed, for the whole of the history of philosophy and (modern) science.5 Husserl's immediate task will be to overcome the naive rationalism of the eighteenth-century and the "unnoticed na'ivetes" of the present day, so that the genuine sense of rationalism may be established. A philosophy is needed which would bring the entelechy of reason to its realization; this is, Husserl explains, reason "... fully conscious of itself in its own essential form, i.e. the form of a. universal philosophy which grows through consistent apodictic insight and supplies its own norms thl'ough an apodictic method." 6 Such a task is intrinsically historical since the manifestation of reason can only come about through concepts, problems, and methods which s Husserl, p. 15. 4 Ibid., p. 13. s Ibid., p. 1. 6 Ibid., p. 16. 682 PETER J. CATALDO are themselves inescapably inherited. We must proceed, then, by "exhibiting" and "testing" the "inner meaning and hidden teleology" of philosophy's history. Husserl concludes: What is clearly necessary (what else could be of help here?) is that we reflect back, in a thorough historical and critical fashion, in order to provide, before all decisions, for a radical self-understanding ; we must inquire back into what was originally and always sought in philosophy, what was continually sought by all the philosophers and philosophies that have communicated with one another historically; but this must include a... (shrink)

Adrian Neculau (ed.) Viata cotidianã în communism (Everyday Life in Communism) Polirom, Iaoi, 2005, 367 pages.

This is the fifth volume in a six-volume translation of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a significant, and continuing, influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. In addition to his landmark works on the theories of history and the human sciences, Dilthey made important contributions to hermeneutics and phenomenology, aesthetics, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences.This volume presents Dilthey's principal writings on (...) aesthetics and the philosophical understanding of poetry, as well as representative essays of literary criticism. The essay "The Imagination of the Poet" is his most sustained attempt to examine the philosophical bearings of literature in relation to psychological and historical theory. Also included are "The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and its Present Task," "Fragments for a Poetics," and two final essays discussing Goethe and Hölderlin. The latter are drawn from Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, a volume that was acclaimed on publication as a classic of literary criticism and that continues to be a model for the geistesgeschichtliche approach to literary history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural MarxismPaul Allen Miller (bio)Jameson, Fredric. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. 296 pp.Fredric Jameson may well be the greatest intellectual produced by the United States in the last half century. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has made as many, as lasting, and as wide-ranging contributions as Jameson. (...) From his early work on Sartre’s style, passing through the twin opera on dialectical theory (Marxism and Form) and formalism and structuralism (Prisonhouse of Language), and the idiosyncratic appreciation of Wyndham Lewis (Fables of Aggression) to that summa of Marxist hermeneutics, The Political Unconscious, and from his major collection of essays, The Ideologies of Theory, through his books on Adorno (Late Marxism) and film (Signatures of the Visible), to that foundational text on postmodern literature, theory, art, and architecture, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and the late work on world cinema (The Geopolitical Aesthetic), utopianism (The Seeds of Time), Brecht (Brecht and Method), modernity (A Singular Modernity), and science fiction (Archaeologies of the Future), Jameson’s career is unparalleled in the American letters. It is perhaps not coincidental, either, that this larger-than-life figure on the intellectual stage ranging easily from Russian formalism to Deleuzean antihumanism, from Balzac to Frank Gehry, and from Hegel to Derrida, is an intellectual dissident. Contemporary American life’s alternation between uncritical consumerism (Marcuse’s one-dimensional man) and nonothing anti-intellectualism (Christian fundamentalism and corporate-fueled jingoism) could only produce such a body of work as an alien presence: its own systemic negation and thus the fullest expression of its deepest internal contradictions. The present collection of interviews from 1981 to the present, then, stands as a welcome commentary on Jameson’s vast work and an important reflection of the changes in American intellectual life in the period from the last days of the Cold War to the end of the second Bush administration.Naturally, as with any collection of interviews, not every thing is new here. Indeed, to the seasoned reader of Jameson, much of this is familiar territory, and there is a fair amount of repetition from one interview to the next (Goethe’s concept of “world literature,” for example, is a recurring motif). Nonetheless, there are many moments of real insight and bold commentary that remind us why Marxism is far from dead and how Jameson has achieved an iconic status rivaling that of Lukacs, Althusser, or Eagleton, as one of the preeminent Marxist thinkers of the last century. Many of these come in the form of vignettes, little snippets of cultural analysis. One such comes in Jameson’s interview with Columbia University Professor of History Anders Stephanson. Here Stephanson asks Jameson to comment on the recent architectural and cultural phenomenon of creating ersatz public spaces. These come in the form of commercial areas that present themselves in guise of “squares,” “plazas,” or “villages.” They make reference to and pastiche traditional forms of life and then re-represent them in the form of a hypercapitalist consumerism. These simulacra of less alienated, precapitalist forms of [End Page 65] life are then presented as depthless surfaces, parodies of authenticity. The archetype of such ersatz public spaces is Disney’s EPCOT:Stephanson: In other words, you are referring to his compressed version of the world; little toy countries where you can orient yourself in no time at all.Jameson: I suppose you can orient yourself because walking paths are available. But where you actually are is a real problem, for you may in fact be in the Florida Everglades, and in this case you are not only in a swamp but also in a simulacrum of a different geographical complex altogether. Disneyland is, on the whole, supremely prophetic and paradigmatic of these multiple shifting and dissolving spatial levels. (49)This is both an insightful observation and a wonderful example of Jameson’s dialectic at work. One moment we’re walking hand in hand with Goofy round the little, fake Eiffel Tower of EPCOT and the next we sink into the morass that paved the Everglades, acquired control... (shrink)

Kierkegaard became a key figure in postmodern philosophy by questioning the very conditions of modernity. Still, the term “deconstruction” seems to reflect his key concerns more precisely, in particular his insistence on a paradox at the heart of Hegel's system, which allows the texts to be deconstructed from within. Some philosophers were concerned with his notion of repetition, uncovering cross‐references between philosophy, literature, and religion. Sacrifice, secrecy, and subjectivity are bones of contention between Levinas and Derrida, but the latter argues (...) that Kierkegaard can hardly be called an advocate of egoism. On the contrary, he is concerned with subjectivity in general, sometimes implying a sacrifice of ethics for the sake of ethical responsibility. Finally, Kierkegaard's notion of writing, suspension of ethics, and repetition gives hope for a future gift, beyond calculation. Whereas Nietzsche concludes that God is dead, the postmoderns see in Kierkegaard the promise of an Other to come. (shrink)

This essay does not aim to investigate film-novel relationships per se, although the fact that the two genres now share certain generative procedures may be further evidence that fiction in print and on film lie to a great extent in a unified field not only of diegesis but also of structure. A diachronic or historical approach to the theory of fictional generators would show that, with the shifts which have occurred on present-day aesthetic thought, much of what once was considered (...) to be a static analysis of retrospective rules or established forms could now be regarded as the disguised beginning of generative theory. Aristotle's seemingly static doctrines of dramatic structure, involving such notions as peripeteia, discovery, or unity of action, to the extent that dramatists had consciously or unconsciously followed such doctrines, obviously served the production of their works, as well as their later analysis. In fact, any sort of artistic intentionality constitutes a kind of "generator," as does the deliberate adherence to outward forms as rhyme schemes, stanzas, cantos, or chapters. As we shall see, it is not always easy to distinguish between generative formulas and self-imposed forms or limits, such as the sonnet with its fourteen lines, its quatrains, and its tercets. Although the most advanced practitioners of generative theory, like Jean Ricardou, seem to view their work as a radical break with the past and the discovery of an entirely new domain of fiction, literary history would provide innumerable examples of precedents, from antiquity through the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, the Gongorists and Baroque poets, and many subsequent groups of writers down to and including the pre-modern and modern periods. Bruce Morrissette has published widely on French fiction of the classical period, Rimbaud and the Symbolist movement, the Nouveau Roman and Robbe-Grillet, and on contemporary film. He is the Sunny Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He translated Alain Robbe-Grillet's "ARTISTS ON ART: Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction" for the Autumn 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The practice and character of biblical hermeneutics, tied as they are to cultural history, are presently undergoing a postmodern phase of reassessing a long hermeneutic development. This chapter aims to show that the history of biblical interpretation is largely determined by the loss of this correspondence in modernity, and by the postmodern attempts to recover this crucial link between mind and being through the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and the hermeneutic philosophies of Hans‐Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, (...) among others. While these philosophers no longer ground the correspondence between consciousness and being in God, they nevertheless insist that language testifies to such a correspondence. For the postmodern, post‐metaphysical interpreter, language becomes “the medium through which consciousness is connected with beings”. Clearly, biblical hermeneutics in the academy is no longer simply dominated by a modernist paradigm. (shrink)

The founding text of modern hermeneutics. Written by the philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher as a method for the interpretation and textual criticism of the New Testament, it develops ideas about language and the interpretation of texts that are in many respects still unsurpassed and are becoming current in the contemporary philosophy of language. Contrary to the traditional view of Schleiermacher as a theorist of empathetic interpretation, in this text he offers a view of understanding that acknowledges both the structurally (...) and historically determined aspects of language and the need to take account of the activity of the individual subject in the constitution of meaning. This volume offers the text in a new translation by Andrew Bowie, together with related writings on secular hermeneutics and on language, and an introduction that places the texts in the context of Schleiermacher's philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

Schutzian Phenomenology and Hermeneutic Traditions links Alfred Schutz to the larger hermeneutic tradition in Continental thought, illuminating the deep affinity between Schutzian phenomenology and hermeneutics. The essays collected here explore a broad spectrum of Schutzian themes and concerns, from Schutz’s concrete affinities to hermeneutic traditions, his interpretationism and the pragmatist nature of Schutz’s thought, to questions concerning the role of the media and music in our understanding of the life-world and intersubjectivity. The essays go on to explore the (...) practical applicability of Schutz’s thoughts on questions regarding economics, literature, ethics and the limits of human understanding. Given its emphasis on the application of Schutzian ideas and concepts, this book willbe of special interest to a wide range of readers in the social sciences and humanities, who are interested in the application of phenomenology to social, political, and cultural phenomena. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surviving American Culture:On Chuck PalahniukEduardo MendietaIn an age in which American culture has become the United States' number one export, along with its weapons, low intensity conflict, carcinogenic cigarettes, its "freedom," and pornography, it is delightful and even a sign of hope that there are writers who have taken on the delicate and perilous task of offering a prognosis of what ails this culture. In the following (...) essay I argue that Chuck Palahniuk's works ought to be read as a mortician's report on American culture. Chuck Palahniuk broke into the literary world by way of the movie version of his first novel: Fight Club (1995). He has gone on to write six other novels: Survivor (1999), Invisible Monsters (2000), Choke (2001), Lullaby (2002), and Diary (2003). He also has published an interesting travel book, Fugitives and Refugees; A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003), but since this is not properly fiction, I will not discuss it in this essay.1Clearly, Palahniuk has already produced a corpus worthy of careful consideration and analysis. Yet, as a west coast writer, far from the literary circles and brokers of the east coast, indeed far away from the clubs of self-promotion and self-monitoring that censure and hold in tight grip the monopoly of criticism that highlights "worthy literature," Palahniuk has not attracted a lot of critical attention. It is only with his most recent work Choke that he has began to be widely reviewed and commented on. In the following I provide a thematic reconstruction of each one of the six published novels, in chronological sequence. I will argue that Palahniuk is not trying to write the "great American novel," although he is profiling himself as a quintessential "American" writer in the midst of post–Cold War megalomania and celebrated Pax Americana. He has taken on a culture that has become so gargantuan, [End Page 394] fragmented, and differentiated but at the same time so rich, so self-reflexive, so historicized and also so mimicked that one novel cannot tell its story in one narrative with one dramatic thread. Many novels, many short cuts, many vignettes, are necessary: one polyphonic, asynchronous, temporally bi-directional, hyper-textual, and cyber-encyclopedic novel made up of individual novels, where each novel is the Bildungsroman of an American hero but told in reverse. These heroes, I will argue, are testimonies to the resilient power of individuals to resist even the most invasive and persistent onslaughts by culture on the physic life of freedom and individuality. I will also argue that he is neither a commercial nor academic writer; that is, he is not the kind of writer who writes either in order to maintain a living or secure tenure. He is a writer with a mission, a vision, and a very distinctive style. The stories that Palahniuk tells are stories that begin at the end, and end at the beginning: they are turned around Bildungsromans. They are, in other words, about unmaking, uncoupling, and disentangling our selves from the normal self into which we have been socialized. These stories are, thus, about the discovery of moral resources that lay dormant in the very simplicity of human solidarity and trust in our will to survive morally untainted, or at least redeemable. I will conclude by arguing that Palahniuk's novels are about surviving American Culture, and about how deviance is the health of the individual in a sick society.One could characterize Fight Club as the intelligent man's response to Robert Bly's Iron John (1990),2 or the fictionalized version of the Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996).3 Alternatively, one could argue that Fight Club is the fin-de-sieclé response to Barbara Ehrenreich's prognosis in her The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) of 1970s and 1980s narcissistic and hedonistic masculinity.4 Chuck Palahniuk's first novel is a biting and poignant look at men in American culture after the end of affluence and the simultaneous "feminization" of masculinity. It is at the same time about the struggle for a viable sense of masculinity in an age in... (shrink)