Macavoy, Leslie. Review of Francis Mootz, et al., eds. GADAMER AND RICOEUR. NDPR (November 2011).

Mootz III, Francis J., and George H. Taylor, eds.  Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics.  London: Continuum, 2011.

This volume is a collection of essays on the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Taylor and Mootz state in their introduction that the motivation for the project was to encourage further interest in both philosophers’ work. The collection aims to "demonstrate the continuing fruitfulness of Gadamer's and Ricoeur's work and to assess continuing points of similarity and difference in order to refine and extend their legacies" (1). All in all, the book accomplishes this goal. The essays are engaging and work to bring philosophical attention back to issues in hermeneutics that remain of pressing importance but which have been less prominent in the continental philosophical literature of late. They also suggest new directions for the application of insights drawn from hermeneutic philosophy.

The collection consists of twelve essays and is organized into three sections. The first and shortest section is entitled 'History' and aims to provide some historical context to the development of hermeneutic philosophy. This section contains only one essay, which seems somewhat out of balance in relation to the number of essays in the other sections, and those interested in the historical development of hermeneutics leading up to Gadamer and Ricoeur might find themselves wanting something more than is offered here. The second, largest part of the book is entitled 'Engagements' and features seven essays that elaborate upon prominent themes in the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur and put their positions into critical engagement with one another. The first four essays in this section critically examine the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur with respect to issues that emerged as significant in the Gadamer-Habermas debate, specifically the emphasis in Gadamer on universality and on belonging to a tradition and its implications for the possibility of a critical hermeneutics. Those interested in this debate and Ricoeur's position in relation to Gadamer on these issues will especially appreciate this part of the book. The third and final section of the book contains four essays and is called 'Extensions.' As the heading suggests, the organizing theme here is to develop and extend the thought of Gadamer and Ricoeur in directions that they do not explicitly pursue. The topics engaged here are quite divergent, ranging from feminism and the body to political action to the philosophy of technology to Chinese philosophy. In what follows, I will offer a few remarks on each of the essays. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27486-gadamer-and-ricoeur-critical-horizons-for-contemporary-hermeneutics/

"Wozu Hermeneutik? 50 Years since TRUTH AND METHOD," NASPH, Seattle University, September 16-18, 2010.

Update: Confirmed Speakers: Nicholas Davey, Dennis Schmidt. Original Post (April 30, 2010): 5th Annual Meeting, North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics. Submissions for papers are invited on all themes related to philosophical hermeneutics, but we are especially interested in papers related to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, Vol. I or II of Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke, and the question of the future development of his hermeneutics. Inorder to promote a spirit of dialogue and meaningful reflection on each paper, presenters will be asked to make their papers available for posting on our web site to be read in advance. Sessions will consist of 15-20 minutes of reflective summaries of papers, followed by 45-60 minutes of discussion. Since papers will not be read in-session, there is some flexibility regarding length: submissions may be between 3,000 and 6,000 words in length. Complete papers in English, formatted for blind review, must be submitted electronically to nasphermeneutics@gmail.com. Attachments in either *.doc or *.rtf format are preferable. The deadline for full-paper submissions is June 15, 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by July 15, 2010. Visit the conference website here: http://sites.google.com/site/nasphdocs/nasph-2010. For more information about the society and/or to be put on an e-mail list, please visit our blog at http://www.nasph.blogspot.com/ or contact Monica Vilhauer (vilhauer@roanoke.edu) or Jamey Findling (findlingj@newmanu.edu).

Dostal, Robert. Review of Kristin Gjesdal, GADAMER AND THE LEGACY OF GERMAN IDEALISM. NDPR (May 2010).

Gjesdal, Kristin. Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism. Cambridge: CUP, 2009. As the title suggests, this is a work that examines the relation of Gadamer's hermeneutics to German Idealism. Gjesdal reminds us with the motto of the book that Gadamer himself writes that his starting point was a "critique of German Idealism and its Romantic traditions" from a Heideggerian point of view. Gjesdal's central thesis is that Gadamer espouses "an aestheticizing model of understanding" that "prevents him from developing an adequate notion of normative issues in hermeneutics" (p. 3). Her critique of Gadamerian hermeneutics, which is developed by the consideration of Gadamer's reading of Kant, Hegel, and the Romantics, represented especially by Schleiermacher, leads her to endorse, against Gadamer, the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher: "I recommend a return to the early nineteenth-century theory of interpretation" (p. 4). . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19548.

"TRUTH AND METHOD Fifty Years After: Gadamer's Influence on the Humanities," University of Leiden, August 26-28, 2010.

Almost fifty years ago, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960) appeared. Among philosophers and theologians, this classic study of interpretation has enjoyed a spectacular reception history. But what sort of Gadamerian influences can be traced in the humanities (history, art history, classics, literary studies, etc.)? How has Truth and Method changed the humanities? Initially, the reception of Gadamerian hermeneutics within the humanities seemed dominated by criticisms such as E. D. Hirsch’s. Accustomed to the language of method and objectivity, many of Hirsch’s generation rejected a hermeneutics that was distinctively unmethodological and openly hostile toward epistemological subject-object dichotomies. However, fifty years after Gadamer’s book the influence of Truth and Method seems to have grown larger than Hirsch’s generation could imagine. Dozens of studies on Gadamer’s significance for (art) history or literary studies have appeared. Since many of these studies stay within the realm of prolegomena to the practice of interpretation, one wonders what broader tendencies they represent. In what sense, if any, do they reflect changing attitudes toward Gadamerian hermeneutics within the humanities? How have they contributed to the reception history of Truth and Method among (art) historians, literary scholars, classicists, etc.? Besides, within these practices of interpretation the past decades have witnessed a rapidly increased openness to some of the themes which Truth and Method famously addressed. These include (but are not limited to) the interpreter’s subject-position, the irreducibility of interpretation to method, the inseparability of meaning and significance, and the mediated nature of knowledge. Is there a sense in which we might speak of a hermeneutic “turn”? To what extent can this turn be attributed to an engagement with Gadamer’s classic text? For a conference to be held on the eve of Truth and Method’s fiftieth anniversary, we solicit proposals dealing with the influence of Gadamer’s book on the theory and practice of interpretation in the humanities. In particular, we welcome three types of papers: 1.Case studies that show in detail how interpretations of selected texts or artworks have changed, or could change, in the light of Gadamerian insights; 2.Discipline-specific overviews that show how Truth and Method, or the secondary literature on Gadamer, has helped transform the disciplines traditionally belonging to the humanities; 3.Critical studies that address the benefits and problems of Gadamerian hermeneutics within the humanities. For further information, visit the conference website here: http://www.hum.leiden.edu/news-agenda/conference-truth-and-method.html.

Bowler, Michael. Review of Lauren Swayne Barthold, GADAMER'S DIALECTICAL HERMENEUTICS. NDPR (April 2010).

Barthold, Lauren Swayne. Gadamer's Dialectical Hermeneutics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. In Gadamer's Dialectical Hermeneutics, Barthold takes on at least three interrelated and important scholarly and philosophical tasks. First, she provides an account of the development of Gadamer's notion of dialectical hermeneutics in its relationship to his reading of Plato and Aristotle, and in particular the manner in which this offers a foundation for a Gadamerian "dialectical ethics." Second, she situates this notion of dialectical hermeneutics and ethics within the debate coming out of Bernstein, Wachterhauser and others over whether or not Gadamer's hermeneutics amounts to a form relativism, essentialism, and/or realism and whether or not it has any ethical import or not. Finally, she attempts to formulate the foundations of Gadamer's dialectical ethics in his analysis of dialogue and its two essential components, solidarity and a transcendent good-beyond-being. I believe that the analysis that comes out of Barthold's attempt to fulfill all three tasks is interesting and insightful. In Chapter 1 she examines Gadamer's reflections on Platonic dialectic and its essential relation to chorismos or separation and in Chapter 2 she looks at Gadamer's account of the unified role played by theoria and praxis in Aristotle's ethics and practical philosophy. In Chapter 3, Barthold considers the eventual divisive separation between theoria and praxis in modern accounts of knowledge in conjunction with Gadamer's attempt to return to Plato and Aristotle in order to retrieve a unity in difference of theoria and praxis in a hermeneutical account of understanding. These three chapters are all fascinating reads that contain substantial insights for those interested in what a dialectical hermeneutics could look like and how it could avoid what many see as the traps of relativism, essentialism and an acontextual, ahistorical realism. Moreover, I think that she is absolutely right to suggest that a proper understanding of solidarity (the "good-for-us") and a "good-beyond-being," namely a notion of the good that transcends our momentary desires, beliefs, etc., is crucial to formulating a dialectical ethics of a particular stripe (Chapter 4, but especially Chapter 5). Furthermore, she demonstrates that reading Gadamer can afford us important insights into each of these issues. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19347.

Vessey, David. Review of John Arthos, THE INNER WORD IN GADAMER'S HERMENEUTICS. NDPR (November 2009).

Arthos, John. The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2009. Gadamer refused to separate doing philosophy from doing the history of philosophy. To philosophize well, he argued, you had to become conscious of the role tradition plays in shaping your concepts and your conclusions. To do the history of philosophy well you have to philosophize well, for to understand a philosopher's views you need to discern what questions his or her views are answering, and that means understanding what questions are good philosophical questions to ask and what would count as good philosophical answers to those questions. Consequently, Gadamer's philosophizing is done in constant dialogue with philosophers of the past and often lying behind even brief references are unarticulated intellectual richness. Readers of Gadamer are just now starting to appreciate all that is in play in his readings of the history of philosophy. John Arthos' 400-page book -- essentially on nine pages of Truth and Method -- will be a model for future scholarship on Gadamer's intellectual inheritance. In the section "Language and Verbum" in the third part of Truth and Method Gadamer makes the remarkable claim that "the human relationship between thought and speech corresponds, despite its imperfections, to the divine relationship of the Trinity." He inststs that a proper understanding of how language connects to the world can only come through reflecting on Augustine's doctrine of the Verbum interius. Arthos not only presents Augustine's doctrine (in Chapter Three, "Hermeneutic Anticipations: The Circular Ontology of the Word in Augustine") he explores in great detail the historical, philosophical, and theological background to Augustine's views. His first chapter, "The Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Word" presents the origins of the Logos doctrine in Hebrew scripture; in ancient, pre-Attic, Greek; in Hellenistic Greek and Judaism (Philo); in Neo-Platonism; and, leaping ahead in time, in early Protestant theology. His second chapter, "Immanence and Transcendence in the Trinity", covers the developments of Patristic Christology and Trinitarian theology. Chapters 4-6 look more closely at the Thomistic (Chapter Four, "'The Word Is Not Reflexive': Mind and World in Aquinas and Gadamer"), Hegelian (Chapter Five, "The Pattern of Hegel's Trinity: The Legacy of Christian Immanence in German Thought") and Heideggerian (Chapter Six, "Heidegger: On the Way to the Verbum") influences on Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. As you can tell from his widely cast net, Arthos provides a general overview of Gadamer's thought. His presentation is distinctive not only for how it emphasizes medieval theological influences on Gadamer's philosophy of language, but also for how it highlights Gadamer's debts to humanism and to the history of rhetoric. In the second part of his book, Arthos provides a new translation of, and an extraordinarily detailed and insightful commentary on, the "Language and Verbum" section from Truth and Method. In that section Gadamer claims that

there is an idea that is not Greek that does more justice to the being of language, and so prevented the forgetfulness of language in Western thought from being complete. This is the idea of Christian incarnation.

The "forgetfulness of language" is the view that since Plato (according to Gadamer) language is understood as standing in a merely semiotic, instrumental relationship to things. Words are signs, they typically have a different kind of being than the things they signify, and we relate to them as tools of use for thought and communication. Gadamer disagrees with this view and argues over the course of the final third of Truth and Method that there is a fundamentally ontological connection between words and things and that language is not first and foremost a tool for our use, but the medium through which the world is disclosed to consciousness. Gadamer holds that we are able to escape the "forgetfulness of language" only because we've inherited the conceptual resources generated by medieval interpretations of the Trinity. He is quick to point out that he is not interested in the theological implications of Trinitarian thought; still, we owe a great debt to Arthos for working out in detail how something that is literally a theological mystery can provide substantive conceptual resources for solving a philosophical problem absolutely central to Gadamer's hermeneutics. Indeed because it sheds light on Gadamer's theory of language, and language is so fundamental to his hermeneutics, through addressing this topic Arthos provides a coherent, systematic overview of Gadamer's philosophy. Although his focus is the small section of Truth and Method, he draws widely from Gadamer's Gesammelte Werke. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18105.

Mootz, Francis. "Gadamer's Rhetorical Conception of Hermeneutics as the Key to Developing a Critical Hermeneutics."

Abstract: The rhetorical dimensions of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics have not been fully developed by his commentators, resulting in an overly conservative rendering of his philosophy. Drawing out the rhetorical features of his work, we find that Gadamer regards textual interpretation as a rhetorical accomplishment. This characterization leads to a rich conception of critical hermeneutics. The article develops Gadamer's rhetorical hermeneutics by contrasting his approach with Paul Ricoeur's famous intervention in the Gadamer-Habermas debate, and looks to Gadamer's account of legal practice as a manifestation of critical hermeneutics in action. Download the whole paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1316033.