A new book:The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat

An interview with the author

JBSP: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Finitude: History & Politics

ANTONIO CALCAGNO: Michel Henry’s Non-Intentionality Thesis and Husserlian Phenomenology

FABIO PRESUTTI: Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and the ‘Idea of Language’ in the Synthesis of ‘Being’

BETH LORD: The Virtual and the Ether: Transcendental Empiricism in Kant’s Opus Postumum

JAMES N. McGUIRK: Aletheia and Heidegger’s Transitional Readings of Plato’s Cave Allegory

TRACY COLONY: The Wholly Other: Being and the Last God in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy

FARHANG ERFANI: Fixing Marx with Machiavelli: Claude Lefort’s Democratic Turn

By Morny Joy

Paul Ricoeur, who identified himself primarily as a hermeneutic phenomenologist, was animated by both a sense of wonder and irrepressible curiosity as he undertook diverse explorations of the meaning and purpose of human existence. Ricoeur appreciated that this task was one of interpretation. Initially this involved an examination of myths and symbols, though in time he came to regard the interpretation of texts as more important. An early catch phrase was: “The symbol gives rise to thought.” His famous subsequent detours into narrative and history helped him to clarify the conditions that both support and hinder human beings’ quest to attain a sense of self or identity. In all of these undertakings, Ricoeur did not think that a conflict of interpretations was necessarily a problem to be overcome, but that it witnessed to the richness of human thinking in a variety of disciplines that employed different approaches. Yet he was not a relativist, believing that there are certain standards of judgment that are available to evaluate proposed interpretations. At the same time, he refused to be dogmatic in his pronouncements. Dialogue and mediation marked his preferred approach and he was both generous and magnanimous in his interrogations of other scholars’ works, always striving to “think more” and reach further constructive insights, rather than pronounce any definitive resolutions. He remarked of his dialectical approach:

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The role of judgment and orientation in hermeneutics — Rudolf A. Makkreel

Aesthetic reflection and its ethical significance: A critique of the Kantian solution — Christoph Menke

Does Kant share Sancho’s dream?: Judgment and sensus communis — Alessandro Ferrara

Reflective judgment as world disclosure — María Pía Lara

Imagination and judgment in Kant’s practical philosophy — Alfredo Ferrarin

Rereading `Truth and Politics’ — Ronald Beiner

Rereading Rawls in Arendtian light: Reflective judgment and historical experience — Carlos Thiebaut

Judgment and the reification of the faculties: A reconstructive reading of Arendt’s Life of the Mind — Robert Fine

Conscience, morality and judgment: An inquiry into the subjective basis of human rights — Serena Parekh

Matisse with Dewey and Deleuze: ERIC ALLIEZ AND JEAN-CLAUDE BONNE

Between Geophilosophy and Political Physiology: JOHN PROTEVI

Facticity and Contingency in Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism: MAX HENNINGER

Immanent Description and Writing From…: STUART GRANT

Lights in the Dark: The Radical Empiricism of Emmanuel Levinas and William James: MEGAN CRAIG

Empiricism, Facticity, and the Immanence of Life in Dilthey: ERIC SEAN NELSON

Duns Scotus’ Concept of the Univocity of Being: Another Look: PHILIP TONNER

Schelling’s Positive Empiricism: RASMUS UGILT

Spinoza’s Third Kind of Knowledge as a Resource for Schelling’s Empiricism: CHRIS LAUER

What is Transcendental Empiricism? Deleuze and Sartre on Bergson: GIOVANNA GIOLI

A Superior Empiricism: The Subject and Experimentation: SIMONE BIGNALL

Emergent Village Podcast

* Jack Caputo
* Richard Kearney
* 50 minutes

Here’s the mp3 file for download

(H/t: Michael O’Rourk)

A new entry at SEP:

Gadamer (1900–2002) does not provide an account of the aesthetic in any customary sense. His approach to art runs, in many ways, against conventional philosophical expectations. Aesthetic qualities are not debated in the manner of the analytic tradition of modern philosophy, nor does he concern himself overtly with the problems of aesthetic pleasure. Gadamer’s approach to aesthetic experience stands squarely in the phenomenological tradition. He is primarily concerned with the place of art in our experience of the world. Furthermore, his approach to aesthetic theory is one of those rare intellectual achievements which are simultaneously deconstructive and constructive. He dismantles elements of the grand tradition of Platonic, Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics and yet offers a phenomenological reconstruction of many of the central insights of that tradition to demonstrate their continuing relevance to our contemporary experience of art. Gadamer is primarily concerned with the cognitive dimension of such experience, with what art works address and what they put at issue. This makes for a flexible philosophical approach capable of ranging freely over a number of art forms and styles, discussing both the singularity of works and their broader significance. The approach is clearly hermeneutical in that it endeavours to re-acquaint us with those received meanings and pre-occupations which underlie our experience of art. Openly influenced by Heidegger, his later essays on language and poetry in particular, Gadamer’s aesthetics is far from traditional.

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A phenomenology of gender — Johanna Oksala

Betrayal in teaching: Persuasion in Kierkegaard, theory and performance — David A. Borman

Heidegger’s animals — Stuart Elden

Lacan’s subversion of the subject — Ed Pluth

Dialectic and dialogue in the hermeneutics of Paul Ricœur and H.G. Gadamer — Francisco J. Gonzalez

From NDPR, a review of The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge Companions to Religion)

The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher, a volume in the Cambridge Companions to Religion series, is divided into three parts (I: Schleiermacher as Philosopher, II: Schleiermacher as Theologian, III: Culture, Society, and Religion), and contains sixteen wide-ranging contributions, along with an Introduction, an extensive Schleiermacher bibliography (including both German texts and English translations), and an Index. I will begin this review with a brief descriptive summary of each contribution, move on to some evaluative comments on a few pieces that may be of particular interest to readers of NDPR (or, at least, that are of particular interest to this reviewer), and conclude with some brief evaluative comments about the volume as a whole.

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PRINCETON, N.J., October 31, 2006 — Clifford Geertz, an eminent scholar in the field of cultural anthropology known for his extensive research in Indonesia and Morocco, died at the age of 80 early yesterday morning of complications following heart surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Geertz was Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he has served on the Faculty since 1970. Dr. Geertz's appointment thirty-six years ago was significant not only for the distinguished leadership it would bring to the Institute, but also because it marked the initiation of the School of Social Science, which in 1973 formally became the fourth School at the Institute.

Dr. Geertz's landmark contributions to social and cultural theory have been influential not only among anthropologists, but also among geographers, ecologists, political scientists, humanists, and historians. He worked on religion, especially Islam; on bazaar trade; on economic development; on traditional political structures; and on village and family life. A prolific author since the 1950s, Dr. Geertz's many books include The Religion of Java (1960); Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968); The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973, 2000); Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980); and The Politics of Culture, Asian Identities in a Splintered World (2002). At the time of his death, Dr. Geertz was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.

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