In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle places the art of medicine alongside other examples of technē. According to Gadamer, however, medicine is different because in medicine the physician does not, properly speaking, produce anything. In The Enigma of Health, rather than introducing Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronēsis (practical wisdom) as a way of understanding medical practice, Gadamer focuses on how medicine is a technē “with a difference”. In this paper, I argue that, despite the richness of his insights, this focus prevents (...) Gadamer from reaching an adequate account of health and the practice of medicine, and I demonstrate how making phronēsis central via a phenomenological description furthers our understanding of the art of healing in important ways. The paper begins with an exploration of Gadamer’s understanding of phronēsis and technē (via Heidegger) to provide a foundation for a phenomenological analysis of the art of healing. After considering the shortcomings of Gadamer’s analyses, I introduce a working definition of “health” that both captures the spirit of Gadamer’s insights and prepares the ground for a phenomenological description. Finally, I introduce concepts from Merleau-Ponty in order to establish an adequate account of the relation between technē and phronēsis and a more nuanced understanding of experience as unfolding within the expressive trajectories forged by bodies that are subject to the weight of the past and the weight of the ideal. The art of medicine, I argue, needs to be understood as expressive behavior in the context of historically and socially situated individuals, institutions, and open trajectories of sense. (shrink)

What is a moment? While Heidegger considers the moment (Augenblick) hermeneutically in the first division of Being and Time, he abandons the thoroughly hermeneutic account in an ecstatic analysis of time in the second. In this paper, I explore the moment in the direction of hermeneutic temporality and finite comprehensibility. I begin by describing how Heidegger’s ecstatic analysis by its very nature forecloses the possibility of the average, everyday constitution of the moment. I then attempt a broader recovery of hermeneutic (...) temporality, specifically instantiated in Gadamer’s temporality of the festival. In so doing, I hope to re-establish the Augenblick as the moment of finite comprehensibility. (shrink)

This is the fifth and final editorial to accompany the last installment of John Williamson's The Case of the Disappearing/Appearing Slow Learner: An Interpretive Mystery. In this editorial, I talk about the intention of publishing Williamson's work in this way as a unique example of applied hermeneutic research. I also discuss what the work teaches us in hermeneutic research: the importance of following good leads.

The philosophical orientation of Gadamerian hermeneutic phenomenology is explored in this paper. Gadamer offers a hermeneutics of the humanities that differs significantly from models of the human sciences historically rooted in scientific methodologies. In particular, Gadamer proposes that understanding is first a mode of being before it is a mode of knowing; what this effectively offers is an alternative to the traditional way of understanding in the human sciences. This paper details why the work of hermeneutics is not to develop (...) a procedure for understanding, but to clarify the conditions of understanding. In this explication, the author examines the hermeneutic experience and, in the process, relates it to both the practical and the historical horizons of the lifeworld of health professionals, particularly nurses. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology<, Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer held that the chief task of philosophy today is to defend practical reason against the encroachments of techno-scientific rationality and thereby to ground the possibility for a philosophical ethics. Although this is well-known and much discussed in the secondary literature, there is curiously sparse discussion of just what Gadamer took ethical inquiry to be. The little discussion that exists tends either to neglect Gadamer's distinction between practical reasoning and philosophical ethics, or it accuses Gadamer himself of conflating the (...) two. This paper provides a sketch of Gadamer's understanding of ethics in a way that makes clear how it differs from practical reasoning. (shrink)

The influence of Husserlian phenomenology on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has been the subject of some analysis in the secondary literature, with scholars emphasizing both Gadame...

En sus análisis sobre la interioridad de la palabra en la hermenéutica de H. G. Gadamer, Jean Grondin afirma que su hermenéutica del vouloir-dire puede comprenderse como una "fenomenología de lo inaparente”. La afirmación deja establecido un vínculo entre la propuesta de Gadamer y esa polémica expresión que Heidegger usó para describir el sentido originario de la fenomenología. Hoy la fenomenología de lo inaparente se ha convertido en su motor a través del debate francés sobre el giro teológico. El objetivo (...) de este trabajo es examinar hasta qué punto esa formulación puede ser también motor de la hermenéutica de Gadamer. Para ello, se examinarán las condiciones de posibilidad e imposibilidad de tal acercamiento. (shrink)

This essay presents Gadamer’s interest in temporality as his strategy for advancing the importance of hermeneutics as philosophy of experience, a strategy that I show becomes significantly more salient with the appearance of his 1992 essay, Wort und Bild. I show how temporal categories function to demarcate the ontological imbalance that is of such central concern in Gadamer’s philosophical project. The paper also considers some common misunderstandings of Gadamer that result from a failure to take full account of his experiential (...) orientation, and thus prevent recognition of its radical potential. A full account must include a grasp of the exemplariness of art in his philosophy, and in this connection, the essay considers, not Gadamer’s ideal of lyric poetry, but the quite distinct exemplariness of narrative art. Though its temporal structure would seem particularly pertinent, it is not this feature, it turns out, that makes it particularly worthy of hermeneutical reflection. (shrink)