Download or read book About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self written by Michel Foucault and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1980, Michel Foucault began a vast project of research on the relationship between subjectivity and truth, an examination of conscience, confession, and truth-telling that would become a crucial feature of his life-long work on the relationship between knowledge, power, and the self. The lectures published here offer one of the clearest pathways into this project, contrasting Greco-Roman techniques of the self with those of early Christian monastic culture in order to uncover, in the latter, the historical origin of many of the features that still characterize the modern subject. They are accompanied by a public discussion and debate as well as by an interview with Michael Bess, all of which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where Foucault delivered an earlier and slightly different version of these lectures. Foucault analyzes the practices of self-examination and confession in Greco-Roman antiquity and in the first centuries of Christianity in order to highlight a radical transformation from the ancient Delphic principle of “know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess all of your thoughts to your spiritual guide.” His aim in doing so is to retrace the genealogy of the modern subject, which is inextricably tied to the emergence of the “hermeneutics of the self”—the necessity to explore one’s own thoughts and feelings and to confess them to a spiritual director—in early Christianity. According to Foucault, since some features of this Christian hermeneutics of the subject still determine our contemporary “gnoseologic” self, then the genealogy of the modern subject is both an ethical and a political enterprise, aiming to show that the “self” is nothing but the historical correlate of a series of technologies built into our history. Thus, from Foucault’s perspective, our main problem today is not to discover what “the self” is, but to try to analyze and change these technologies in order to change its form.
Download or read book Self Understanding and Lifeworld written by Hans-Helmuth Gander and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the foundations of human self-understanding and the value of responsible philosophical questioning? Focusing on Heidegger's early work on facticity, historicity, and the phenomenological hermeneutics of factical-historical life, Hans-Helmuth Gander develops an idea of understanding that reflects our connection with the world and other, and thus invites deep consideration of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. He draws usefully on Husserl's phenomenology and provides grounds for exchange with Descartes, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault. On the way to developing a contemporary hermeneutical philosophy, Gander clarifies the human relation to self in and through conversation with Heidegger's early hermeneutics. Questions about reading and writing then follow as these are the very actions that structure human self-understanding and world understanding.
Download or read book Hermeneutics A Very Short Introduction written by Jens Zimmermann and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hermeneutics is the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, a behaviour that is intrinsic to our daily lives. As humans, we decipher the meaning of newspaper articles, books, legal matters, religious texts, political speeches, emails, and even dinner conversations every day . But how is knowledge mediated through these forms? What constitutes the process of interpretation? And how do we draw meaning from the world around us so that we might understand our position in it? In this Very Short Introduction Jens Zimmermann traces the history of hermeneutic theory, setting out its key elements, and demonstrating how they can be applied to a broad range of disciplines: theology; literature; law; and natural and social sciences. Demonstrating the longstanding and wide-ranging necessity of interpretation, Zimmermann reveals its significance in our current social and political landscape. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book The Hermeneutics of the Subject written by Michel Foucault and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-04-02 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, one of the world's most prestigious institutions. Faculty at the Collège give public lectures, in which they present works-in-progress on any subject of their choosing. Foucault's wide-ranging lectures influenced his groundbreaking works like The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish. In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses on how the "self" and the "care of the self" were convinced during the period of antiquity, beginning with Socrates. The problems of the ethical formation of the self, Foucault argues, form the background for our own questions about subjectivity and remain at the center of contemporary moral thought. This series of lectures throws new light on Foucault's final works and shows the full depth of his engagement with ancient thought. Lucid and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers.
Download or read book Speaking the Truth about Oneself written by Michel Foucault and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Speaking the Truth about Oneself is composed of lectures that acclaimed French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered in 1982 at the University of Toronto. As is characteristic of his later work, he is concerned here with the care and cultivation of the self, which becomes the central theme of the second and third volumes of his famous History of Sexuality, published in French in 1984, the month of his death, and which are explored here in a striking and typically illuminating fashion. Throughout his career, Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and constitute subjects. But in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are constituted by outside forces but in how they constitute themselves. In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, we find Foucault focused on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman dynasties, and concluding with fourth- and fifth-century Christian monasticism. Foucault's claim is that, in these periods, we see the development of a new kind of act-"speaking the truth" (about oneself)-as the locus of a new form of subjectivity, which he deemed important not just for historical reasons but also as something modernity could harness anew or adapt to its own purposes"--
Download or read book Homo Interpretans written by Johann Michel and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading contemporary philosopher Johann Michel offers an innovative reflection on the human being. The book presents an interdisciplinary study that engages philosophy, sociology and anthropology, offering a systematic analysis of the phenomenon of interpretation.
Download or read book Subjectivity and Truth written by Michel Foucault and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-22 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The working hypothesis is this: it is true that sexuality as experience is obviously not independent of codes and systems of prohibitions, but it needs to be recalled straightaway that these codes are astonishingly stable, continuous, and slow to change. It needs to be recalled also that the way in which they are observed or transgressed also seems to be very stable and very repetitive. On the other hand, the point of historical mobility, what no doubt change most often, what are most fragile, are modalities of experience.” - Michel Foucault In 1981 Foucault delivered a course of lectures which marked a decisive reorientation in his thought and of the project of a History of Sexuality outlined in 1976. It was in these lectures that arts of living became the focal point around which he developed a new way of thinking about subjectivity. It was also the moment when Foucault problematized a conception of ethics understood as the patient elaboration of a relationship of self to self. It was the study of the sexual experience of the Ancients that made these new conceptual developments possible. Within this framework, Foucault examined medical writings, tracts on marriage, the philosophy of love, or the prognostic value of erotic dreams, for evidence of a structuration of the subject in his relationship to pleasures (aphrodisia) which is prior to the modern construction of a science of sexuality as well as to the Christian fearful obsession with the flesh. What was actually at stake was establishing that the imposition of a scrupulous and interminable hermeneutics of desire was the invention of Christianity. But to do this it was necessary to establish the irreducible specificity of ancient techniques of self. In these lectures, which clearly foreshadow The Use of Pleasures and The Care of Self, Foucault examines the Greek subordination of gender differences to the primacy of an opposition between active and passive, as well as the development by Imperial stoicism of a model of the conjugal bond which advocates unwavering fidelity and shared feelings and which leads to the disqualification of homosexuality.
Download or read book Hermeneutics and Reflection written by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Von Hermann's Hermeneutics and Reflection, translated here from the original German, represents the most fundamental and critical reflection in any language of the concept of phenomenology as it was used by Heidegger and by Husserl.
Download or read book Ricoeur s Hermeneutics of Religion written by Brian Gregor and published by . This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this important new book, Brian Gregor gives a comprehensive account of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of religion, which focuses on the regeneration of human capability. Gregor documents the thinkers, movements, and themes that shaped Ricoeur's thought and gives a critical examination of Ricoeur's philosophical interpretation of religion.
Download or read book Orientation Judgment in Hermeneutics written by Rudolf A. Makkreel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-05-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an innovative approach to meeting the challenges faced by philosophical hermeneutics in interpreting an ever-changing and multicultural world. Rudolf A. Makkreel proposes an orientational and reflective conception of interpretation in which judgment plays a central role. Moving beyond the dialogical approaches found in much of contemporary hermeneutics, he focuses instead on the diagnostic use of reflective judgment, not only to discern the differentiating features of the phenomena to be understood, but also to orient us to the various meaning contexts that can frame their interpretation. Makkreel develops overlooked resources of Kant’s transcendental thought in order to reconceive hermeneutics as a critical inquiry into the appropriate contextual conditions of understanding and interpretation. He shows that a crucial task of hermeneutical critique is to establish priorities among the contexts that may be brought to bear on the interpretation of history and culture. The final chapter turns to the contemporary art scene and explores how orientational contexts can be reconfigured to respond to the ways in which media of communication are being transformed by digital technology. Altogether, Makkreel offers a promising way of thinking about the shifting contexts that we bring to bear on interpretations of all kinds, whether of texts, art works, or the world.
Download or read book Gadamer written by Donatella Di Cesare and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), one of the towering figures of contemporary Continental philosophy, is best known for Truth and Method, where he elaborated the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics," a programmatic way to get to what we do when we engage in interpretation. Donatella Di Cesare highlights the central place of Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, in Gadamer's work, brings out differences between his thought and that of Heidegger, and connects him with discussions and debates in pragmatism. This is a sensitive and thoroughly readable philosophical portrait of one of the 20th century's most powerful thinkers.
Download or read book Identifying Selfhood written by Henry Isaac Venema and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2000-09-28 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifying Selfhood provides the first sustained treatment of the development of Paul Ricoeur's decentered formulation of selfhood from his earliest works to his most recent. For Henry Venema, Ricoeur's affirmation that consciousness is always rooted in the signs, symbols, and texts that precede the hermeneutical project of self-recovery and discovery provides the thread that links all of Ricoeur's philosophical inquiries together. However, as Venema argues, Ricoeur's hermeneutic is caught up in the semantics of identity to such an extent that selfhood is confused and often equated with the textuality of the reflective process and is never dealt with on the intimate level of the reflexive structure of selfhood in relation to otherness. In the end, Ricoeur's formulation of alterity identifies the other within the circle of the self-same.
Download or read book Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur written by Scott Davidson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon calls attention to the dynamic interaction that takes place between hermeneutics and phenomenology in Ricoeur’s thought. It could be said that Ricoeur’s thought is placed under a twofold demand: between the rigor of the text and the requirements of the phenomenon. The rigor of the text calls for fidelity to what the text actually says, while the requirement of the phenomenon is established by the Husserlian call to return “to the things themselves.” These two demands are interwoven insofar as there is a hermeneutic component of the phenomenological attempt to go beyond the surface of things to their deeper meaning, just as there is a phenomenological component of the hermeneutic attempt to establish a critical distance toward the world to which we belong. For this reason, Ricoeur’s thought involves a back and forth movement between the text and the phenomenon. Although this double movement was a theme of many of Ricoeur’s essays in the middle of his career, the essays in this book suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology remains implicit throughout his work. The chapters aim to highlight, in much greater detail, how this back and forth movement between phenomenology and hermeneutics takes place with respect to many important philosophical themes, including the experience of the body, history, language, memory, personal identity, and intersubjectivity.
Download or read book Gadamer s Hermeneutics written by Robert J. Dostal and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gadamer’s Hermeneutics Robert J. Dostal provides a comprehensive and critical account of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy, arguing that Gadamer’s enterprise is rooted in the thesis that “being that can be understood is language.” He defends Gadamer against charges of linguistic idealism and emphasizes language’s relationship to understanding, though he criticizes Gadamer for too often ignoring the role of the prelinguistic in our experience. Dostal goes on to explain the concept of the "inner word" for Gadamer’s account of language. The book situates Gadamer’s hermeneutics in three important ways: in relation to the contestability of the legacy of the Enlightenment project; in relation to the work of his mentor, Martin Heidegger; and in relation to Gadamer’s reading of Plato and Aristotle. Dostal explores both Gadamer’s claim on the Enlightenment and his ambivalence toward it. He considers Gadamer’s dependence on Heidegger’s accomplishment while pointing out the ways in which Gadamer charted his own course, rejecting his teacher’s reading of Plato and his antihumanism. Dostal points out notable differences in the philosophers’ politics as well. Finally, Dostal mediates between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and what might be called philological hermeneutics. His analysis defends the civic humanism that is the culmination of the philosopher’s hermeneutics, a humanism defined by moral education, common sense, judgment, and taste. Supporters and critics of Gadamer’s philosophy will learn much from this major achievement.
Download or read book Theological Hermeneutics and the Book of Numbers as Christian Scripture written by Richard S. Briggs and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-06-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should Christian readers of scripture hold appropriate and constructive tensions between exegetical, critical, hermeneutical, and theological concerns? This book seeks to develop the current lively discussion of theological hermeneutics by taking an extended test case, the book of Numbers, and seeing what it means in practice to hold all these concerns together. In the process the book attempts to reconceive the genre of "commentary" by combining focused attention to the details of the text with particular engagement with theological and hermeneutical concerns arising in and through the interpretive work. The book focuses on the main narrative elements of Numbers 11–25, although other passages are included (Numbers 5, 6, 33). With its mix of genres and its challenging theological perspectives, Numbers offers a range of difficult cases for traditional Christian hermeneutics. Briggs argues that the Christian practice of reading scripture requires engagement with broad theological concerns, and brings into his discussion Frei, Auerbach, Barth, Ricoeur, Volf, and many other biblical scholars. The book highlights several key formational theological questions to which Numbers provides illuminating answers: What is the significance and nature of trust in God? How does holiness (mediated in Numbers through the priesthood) challenge and redefine our sense of what is right, or "fair"? To what extent is it helpful to conceptualize life with God as a journey through a wilderness, of whatever sort? Finally, short of whatever promised land we may be, what is the context and role of blessing?
Download or read book Gadamer and Ricoeur written by Francis J. Mootz III and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-04-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur were two of the most important hermeneutical philosophers of the twentieth century. Gadamer single-handedly revived hermeneutics as a philosophical field with his many essays and his masterpiece, Truth and Method. Ricoeur famously mediated the Gadamer-Habermas debate and advanced his own hermeneutical philosophy through a number of books addressing social theory, religion, psychoanalysis and political philosophy. This book brings Gadamer and Ricoeur into a hermeneutical conversation with each other through some of their most important commentators. Twelve leading scholars deliver contemporary assessments of the history and promise of hermeneutical philosophy, providing focused discussion on the work of these two key hermeneutical thinkers. The book shows how the horizons of their thought at once support and question each other and how, in many ways, the work of these two pioneering philosophers defines the issues and agendas for the new century.
Download or read book Hermeneutical Heidegger written by Michael Bowler and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hermeneutical Heidegger critically examines and confronts Heidegger's hermeneutical approach to philosophy and the history of philosophy. Heidegger's work, both early and late, has had a profound impact on hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy. The essays in this volume are striking in the way they exhibit the variety of perspectives on the development and role of hermeneutics in Heidegger's work, allowing a multiplicity of views on the nature of hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy to emerge. As Heidegger argues, the rigor and strength of philosophy do not consist in the development of a univocal and universal method, but in philosophy's ability to embrace—not just tolerate—the questioning of its basic concepts. The essays in Hermeneutical Heidegger are exemplars of this kind of rigor and strength.
