The Hermeneutic Spot

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/21/2025, 4:48:00 PM

*New Book Alert* Michael Staudigl, Barbara Weber, Karel Novotný (eds.), _Intertwinings: Exploring Intersubjectivity, Embodiment, and Alterity with James Mensch_ This anthology offers a comprehensive introduction to the contemporary phenomenologist James R. Mensch, exploring his oeuvre and thought. Mensch's extensive body of work spans several decades, often concretely engaging with three intersecting conditions of dialogue: Alterity, Intersubjectivity, and Embodiment. The contributors to this book pick up these themes and explore the fragility and potentiality of our conceptions of discourse, dialogue, and the political. Moreover, and in applying Mensch's idea of a post-foundational phenomenology, this anthology honors Mensch's expansive work, which spans key thinkers such as Husserl, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Patočka, and delves into subjects ranging from perception and time to ethics and ecology. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-68701-3

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/25/2025, 6:55:25 PM

*New Gadamer Translation* ✨ _Ancient Sources, Modern Appropriations_ _The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Volume III_ Eds. and Trans. Pol Vandevelde & Arun Iyer This new collection of essays is a remarkable demonstration and illustration of how the study of the history of philosophy contributes to the task of doing philosophy by keeping a tradition alive and offering a future to the thinkers of the past. This third volume also includes a substantial critical introduction, a critical apparatus of notes, and several glossaries. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/ancient-sources-modern-appropriations-9781441112743/?utm_source=Bloomsbury+Academic+%26+Professional&utm_campaign=0505e770cd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_12_19_02_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-0505e770cd-605937159&mc_cid=0505e770cd

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/7/2025, 5:35:11 PM

*New Essay* Carolyn Culbertson, "Shared Understanding Before Semantic Agreement: Gadamer on the Hidden Ground of Linguistic Community" Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that language is the medium of all understanding and thus that it is the medium through which we can reach understanding with one another. Yet many today are sceptical of this claim and worry that Gadamerian hermeneutics ignores at its own peril the limits of the particular discourses that people utilize to reach understanding with one another. I argue here that this criticism rests on the assumption that, for Gadamer, it is the semantic features of a language alone that allow it to function as the medium for shared understanding. I argue that focusing solely on semantic agreement as the source of understanding ignores the role that mutual recognition plays in allowing language to serve as a medium for shared understanding. I turn to discussions in several of Gadamer’s later essays to examine how he conceives of the mutual recognition that is essential for communicative understanding. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071773.2024.2442115

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/20/2025, 5:26:05 PM

*Obituary* Boston College's John Sallis, a phenomenologist, a philosopher, a mentor, passed away on Feb 18, 2025. Rest in peace. https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/morrissey/departments/philosophy/people/faculty-directory/john-sallis.html

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/7/2025, 5:36:32 PM

*New Essay* Jeff Malpas & Niall Keane, "Gadamer in the English-Speaking World" Providing a summary history of the reception of Gadamer's work in English across a range of disciplines from literature to philosophy, this essay also explores elements of both influence and convergence connecting Gadamer's thinking with that of several key figures in twentieth century analytic philosophy. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071773.2024.2444459

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/7/2025, 5:34:05 PM

*New Essay* Elena Romagnoli, "Hegel as a Key to the Social Role of Art in Gadamer’s Aesthetics" My paper aims to highlight the presence of a social conception of art in Gadamer’s thought by analysing his reading of Hegel’s aesthetics. In an initial section I reconstruct the core of Gadamer’s reading of Hegel’s aesthetics as a paradigm to reassess art against the limits of aestheticism. I subsequently focus on the analysis Gadamer provides of the fundamental topic of the “past-character of art”, by stressing how this is reassessed as a “presence of the past”. On this basis, I show how Gadamer’s reading of Hegel helps him focus on the role of contemporary art forms. If in modernity art lost its self-evident character, this does not prevent it from establishing a sense of community. Contemporary art is a search for a communal and social element. Gadamer’s characterization of contemporary art as a work-in-progress and intrinsically linked to the audience’s participation lays the basis for rethinking Gadamer’s aesthetics in a performative direction. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071773.2024.2443452

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/7/2025, 5:30:29 PM

*New Essay* Theodore George, "On Gadamer’s Legacy: Postmodern Hermeneutics, New-Realist Hermeneutics, and the Tension of Understanding" The legacy of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics includes not only several positions that continue to influence current debate in the field. He also leaves the legacy of an important philosophical tension based in the way he conceives of understanding. On the one hand, Gadamer maintains that genuine understanding remains true to matters themselves. On the other hand, though, he acknowledges that understanding is always mediated by language, and, thereby, meaning inherited from tradition. After a brief consideration of this tension in Gadamer’s thought, the author argues that this tension leads to a divide between two post-Gadamerian approaches in hermeneutics, one postmodern and the other new-realist. Postmodern hermeneutics is shown to give priority to the role played by language in understanding while new-realist hermeneutics is shown to stress the focus of understanding on the matters themselves. The author concludes with a brief consideration of the normative implications of this legacy. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071773.2024.2442113

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/7/2025, 5:32:09 PM

*New Essay* John Arthos, "A Hermeneutics for the Human Barnyard: The Nascent Political Radicality of Gadamer’s Theory of Experience" Gadamer offered a paradigm of hermeneutic experience and understanding as a humanist alternative to the scientific rationality that dominates Western modernity. He derived his perspective in great part from the philosophy of his mentor, Martin Heidegger, but he was grounded less in ontology than in his own humanistic training in classical philosophy, art, and literature. It was only somewhat late (in his debates with Habermas) that he grappled with the political relevance of his theory, but even in that context, he continued to insist on its universal applicability. This paper takes the position that Gadamer’s account of hermeneutic understanding provides an inadequate approach to the political dimensions of modernity, but that there is a radical kernel in his theory of experience that is relevant to political engagement. I suggest a way to reconfigure his model of hermeneutic experience that highlights this radical feature as the basis for viable political hermeneutics. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071773.2024.2446394

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/7/2025, 6:00:03 PM

*New Book Alert* Iain D. Thomson, _Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger_ In this book, Thomson presents a compelling rereading of Heidegger's important and influential understanding of existential death. Thomson lucidly explains how Heidegger's phenomenology of existential death led directly to the insights which forced him to abandon Being and Time's guiding pursuit of a fundamental ontology, and thus how his early, pro-metaphysical work gave way to his later efforts to do justice to being in its real phenomenological richness and complexity. He also examines and clarifies the often abstruse responses to Heidegger's rethinking of death in Levinas, Derrida, Agamben, Beauvoir, and others, explaining the enduring significance of this work for ongoing efforts to think clearly about death, mortality, education, and politics. The result is a powerful and illuminating study of Heidegger's understanding of existential death and its enduring importance for philosophy and life. https://tinyurl.com/4ecrjfev

The Hermeneutic Spot

2/7/2025, 5:27:47 PM

*New Essay* James Risser, "Crossings: Hermeneutics as Passage" This paper follows the implications of Gadamer’s hermeneutics after Truth and Method in which the forming of social life, and with it the idea of worldly understanding, receives greater attention. I argue that the emphasis in his later writings on worldly understanding draws less on the idea of the hermeneutic circle and problematic of the Geisteswissenschaften in which the concept of tradition is prominent than on the movement in language and the encounter with the other. As in the example of translation, I argue that this movement has the character of passage from one place to another that holds within it an element of opacity. The development of this issue draws on a comparative analysis with the work of the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant. From this analysis I show how Gadamer’s hermeneutics addresses the issue of understanding across cultures and in mixed cultures. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071773.2024.2442120