What the authors attempt to address in this paper is a Kantian question: not whether, but how is cross -cultural understanding possible? And specifically, what is a more effective approach for cross -cultural understanding? The answer lies in an analysis of two different models of cross -cultural understanding, that is, propositional and hermeneutic understanding. To begin with, the author presents a linguistic interpretation of culture, i.e., a culture as a linguistically formulated and transmitted symbolic system with its conceptual core as (...) a scheme of basic cultural presuppositions, which it referred to as a cultural language. After exploring the essential role of cultural presuppositions in cross -cultural understanding, the author discusses the traditional model of cross -cultural understanding, namely, the propositional model. Through critically examining the two popular versions of the propositional model, i.e., the projective approach and the adoptive approach to cross -cultural understanding, it is found that cross -cultural propositional understanding is doomed to failure. To move us beyond the absolutism -relativism trap embedded within propositional understanding, the author first introduces and discusses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding, and then applies Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic model of understanding to cross -cultural understanding. It is finally concluded that cross -cultural understanding is essentially hermeneutic—including the case of cultural learning, not propositional. Therefore, cross -cultural understanding is hermeneutically possible. (shrink)

The current discussions of conceptual schemes and related topics are misguided; for they are based on a tacit assumption that the difference between two schemes consists in the different distributions in truth-values. I argue that what should concern us, in the discussions of conceptual schemes and related issues, is not truth-values of assertions, but rather the truth-value-status of the sentences used to make the assertions. This is because the genuine conceptual innovation between alternative theories or languages does not lie in (...) differences in determining truth-values of their sentences, but turns on whether these sentences have truth-values when considered within the context of a competing one. This new interpretation of the notion of conceptual schemes, which I refer to as presuppositional languages, is not only good in itself—for establishing the intelligibility and tenability of the notion—but quite beneficial in its effect on other related issues. (shrink)

Heidegger’s philosophy is a significant contribution to understanding the meaning of lived experience. Recognizing this, nurses and other health professionals have taken on the research approach of Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology. This requires reading the writing of Heidegger. Philosophers themselves acknowledge this writing is dense, difficult to grasp, uses language for which there is no easy translation, and leaves the reader with more questions than answers. Drawing on commentary from philosophers who seek to read Heidegger and from a research study which (...) interviewed doctoral students who were “reading Heidegger,” we seek to show the nature of the experience of pursuing such a challenging quest. (shrink)

It is one thing to read about the methodology and methods of Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenological research, the ontic description. It is quite another thing to be faced with an interview transcript. This article draws on a study that asked doctoral students about their experience of doing such research. How did they become “phenomenological/hermeneutic” in their thinking and writing? What helped them to find their way? We offer this article as a means of letting others learn from our own experiences. We (...) support our insights with the writings of Heidegger and Gadamer to show the methodological congruence that is essential to Heideggerian phenomenological hermeneutic research. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this essay, I shall discuss Gadamer’s interpretation of Celan’s dialogical poetry in his essay “Wer bin Ich und wer bist Du?” (“Who am I and Who are You?”). One may argue that this is Gadamer’s articulation of the problem of the self-other relationship. To understand the question of self and other, it is first of all necessary to return to the poetic word from which the question arises. Speaking is, for Gadamer, the most profoundly self-forgetful action, because when (...) one speaks, one is so deeply “within the word” that one is not turned toward the word but, rather, to what one wants to say with the word. For hermeneutics, interpreting means putting oneself on the task of the poetic text. The proximity between poetizing and interpreting emerges, also in its specificity concerning the proximity between poetizing and thinking. Such a proximity, in turn, divides itself into two extremes: the word that sublates itself, and the word that stands for itself. It is hence the uncertain fullness of language, where, unsurprisingly, both poetizing and interpreting come into themselves, which constitutes the link between the one and the other. Therefore, the interpreted word, intertwined with the poetic word does not replace what it indicates, but merely points beyond itself, to what is other than itself. Both pursue a meaning that points toward an open realm. (shrink)

The practical nature of all human understanding lies at the heart of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, yet the stress he places on practicality and his appeal to Aristotle remain relatively neglected by the secondary literature. This neglect is due in part to a failure to see the great extent to which Gadamer relies on the Aristotelian concept of phronēsis (practical wisdom) and, to a lesser extent, on the Hegelian concept of the concrete universal. The purpose of this paper is to show (...) how the proper understanding of Aristotle's notions of practical wisdom and theoretical knowing, both of which are crucial to an appreciation of Gadamer's description of human understanding as Spiel (“game” or “play”), will help to reverse two of the recurring mischaracterizations of philosophical hermeneutics: first, that it is ultimately anti-science (against method and theory) and second, that critical reason or rationality plays only a minor role within it. (shrink)

In the vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be.In “the age of commemoration” (Stone 2010), it is ironic that we have developed such an affective immunity to the commemorative artifacts that fill our cities. In downtown Washington, Boston, or Philadelphia, many pedestrians stroll past a dozen or more memorials in a single afternoon, usually failing to pay much attention to the specific historical calling they make. Outside the ritualistic and consumptive settings where (...) tourists encounter a city’s most popular monuments, many artifacts of public memory simply blend into the mundane architectural atmosphere that surrounds them. As John Berger has pointed out, works of art—and .. (shrink)

This paper considers how a Shi’a Islamic perspective of wisdom can inform contemporary business ethics theory. Given the growing business ethics literature that adopts an Islamic orientation, it is vital that Islamic tenets in a business context are established. Thus, this paper thoroughly researches the tenets of Shi’a wisdom theory using a hermeneutic analysis, guided also by Iranian theological scholars of ancient Persian and Arabic foundational texts, to provide a comprehensive explanation of the foundations of Shi’a faith relevant to business (...) ethics. Having established the principles of Shi’a wisdom, we outline points of consonance and dissonance in comparison to the Western humanist, primarily Aristotelian, orientations to wisdom. Although identifying apparently irreconcilable differences, this analysis reveals important elements of Shi’a wisdom theory that can significantly invigorate and influence business ethics theory. (shrink)

The article discusses the problem of interpretation in law. Are there some criteria by which we can distinguish a good interpretation from a bad one, interpretation from over-interpretation? It is argued in this article that there is always a choice in defining the meaning of a text and this choice can be seen as an ethical one. This article thus studies the question of limits of interpretation by focusing on the ethical elements of interpretation. It is argued here that legal (...) interpretation contains a requirement of justice that shapes the responsibility that the interpreter carries for his choices of meaning. Therefore the ethical elements of interpretation are especially pressing in the interpretation of legal texts. (shrink)

It is an idea that stands at the heart of fiction that it can show us new possibilities for the world in which we live. It is perhaps partly for this reason that philosophers and theorists of ficti...

At the heart of our experience of literature is the idea that fiction can show us new possibilities for the world in which we live. I open up fictional worlds’ hermeneutic dimension by investigating the intersection of Roman Ingarden’s analytic phenomenology of the literary work with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Reading Ingarden together with Gadamer, I understand a fictional world as an orientation towards a fictional environment whose foundation is our capacity for language, showing how the reciprocal relationship in which (...) we discover its fictional objects and states of affairs is of the same kind that exists between language and world, so that fiction can be understood to orient us towards the happening of language. By thinking on the relationship between language and experience, I suggest that Ingarden and Gadamer propose to understand a fictional world as an orientation towards our very capacity to be otherwise and to exceed ourselves. (shrink)

Wolterstorff defends the claim not only that ‘God speaks’ through the Bible but also that the reader gains ever new insights upon subsequent readings of it. I qualify this project with the philosophical hermeneutics he rejects—namely that of Gadamer and Ricoeur. Wolterstorff thinks what he calls ‘authorial discourse interpretation’ provides warrant for religious communities believing that ‘God speaks’ to them through a text. In developing this hermeneutic, he dismisses the viability of Gadamer and Ricoeur's approach because, Wolterstorff asserts, their form (...) of interpretation is merely an operation performed on an artifact. While a cursory study of Gadamer and Ricoeur might support such dismissal, particularly Ricoeur's emphasis on writing's obliteration of dialogue, a closer study guided by the hermeneutic priority of questioning complicates Wolterstorff's caricature. If writing obliterates dialogue, what happens to questions and responses? My thesis is that dialogue with another is preserved through the hermeneutical arc. I demonstrate this through specifying distinct logics of question and answer that occur in the reading process, and I delimit these logics by way of appeal to contemporary literacy pedagogy and its taxonomies of questions. A voice does speak with and listen to a reader in the event of reading, in this case a God who is not behind but before the text. Isolating this other who speaks and listens provides reinforcement for constructive theological work aligned with Gadamer and Ricoeur's hermeneutics, and answers for the experience of hearing ‘God speak’ differently through sacred texts. (shrink)

One of the fundamental theses of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is that all knowledge is historically conditioned. This thesis appears to be self-refuting. That is, it appears to contradict itself insofar as its assertion that every knowledge claim is historically conditioned seems to assert an absolute, unconditionally true knowledge claim. If the historicity thesis does, in fact, refute itself in this way, then that spells trouble for philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer was well aware of this, and so he attempts in several passages (...) to respond to this charge of self-contradiction. Those passages, however, are brief and difficult to understand. They consequently have been either neglected or inadequately understood. This paper makes better sense of those passages in order to defend Gadamer’s historicity thesis as coherent. (shrink)

According to the received translational interpretation of incommensurability, incommensurability is viewed as untranslatability due to radical variance of meaning or reference of the terms in two competing scientific languages. The author argues that the translational approach to incommensurability does not effectively clarify the concept of incommensurability. Since it cannot provide us with tenable, integrated concept of incommensurability, it should be rejected.

The aim of this article is to explore Gadamer’s early reflections on Plato’s utopian thought and its potential topicality. In the following section, I will show how areté, understood as a hermeneutical and existential virtue, is dialectically related to ethics and politics in Gadamer’s phenomenological reception of Plato’s philosophy. I argue that, in Gadamer’s eyes, Socratic-Platonic self-understanding enables human beings to be aware of their political responsibilities, to recognize how they are existentially and mutually related to the other, and to (...) clarify dialectically their own existential possibilities in order to transcend their inherited world of values. In the third section, I aim to show how these are the grounds on which Gadamer’s initial thoughts on the utopian dimension of Platonic political philosophy developed, mainly through his further critical account of the works on the German “political Plato” published in Germany between 1927 and 1933, i.e., Kurt Singer’s Platon, der Gründer (1927), Julius Stenzel’s Platon. Der Erzieher (1928), and Kurt von Hildendrandt‘s Platon, Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht (1933). Then, in the fourth section, I will express my own views on the relevance of reconsidering how the notions of areté, phrónesis, and andreía are already related in Plato’s dialogues, complementing the insights on Gadamer’s interpretation of areté in section two. My purpose is to go beyond Gadamer’s reading and provide us with a more solid ground to address his late reflections on political courage and its relations with his dialectical understanding of Platonic utopia as a myth. Therefore, I will explore the problem of civil disobedience, a topic that was actually not at the centre of Gadamer’s concerns, as a genuine mode of utopian political action which can enact a true deviation from the sophistic pólis and its understanding of power. Finally, in the conclusion, I will characterize Gadamer’s portrait of Platonic utopia as a dialectical myth which enables human beings to recognize when politics are being reduced to mere power abuse by the State and also suggest why Gadamer’s approach to utopias is still relevant today. (shrink)

This in-depth qualitative study considered how women from two different generations came to understand birth in the context of their own experience but also in the milieu of other women’s stories. For the purposes of this thesis the birth story encompassed personal oral stories as well as media and other representations of contemporary childbirth, all of which had the potential to elicit emotional responses and generate meaning in the interlocutor. The research utilised a hermeneutic phenomenological approach underpinned by the philosophies (...) of Heidegger and Gadamer. This methodology allowed the significance of the experience of engaging with stories to be grasped, and in-depth insights into the meanings and lived experience for women of the phenomenon to be made. Twenty participants were purposively selected, recruited and interviewed. In phase one ten women who were expecting their first baby in 2013 were recruited in order to explore how they understood birth prior to the event and in the light of other women’s stories. Birth stories were revealed as one of many ‘voices’ offering ‘advice’ to women about birth. The women also talked about classes they had attended, books they had read, websites and online forums they had accessed, as well as television programmes and films they had watched. The conversations with the first cohort of women led to further questions about whether the information gleaned from media and virtual birth story mediums creates meaningful knowledge about birth for women. The second phase evolved from this thinking. In phase two interviews with an older cohort of women were undertaken to determine whether women from a different era were more able to translate knowledge into meaning. This was based on the belief that, for this generation of women, stories were mediated by personal contact and not though virtual technologies as in the previous generation of women. Phenomenological conversations with the participants took place in the iterative circle of reading, writing and thinking. This revealed the experience of ‘being-in-the-world’ of birth for the two generations of women and the way of communicating within that world. From a Heideggerian perspective, the birth story was constructed through ‘idle talk’ and took place across a variety of media accessed by women, as well as through face to face conversations. Five central and interrelated interpretive findings emerged. Firstly the stories the women engaged with, had a significant role to play in their understanding and expectations of birth. The ‘norm’ as portrayed in the stories circulating in 2013, for instance, was one which perpetuated what one participant described as the ‘drama of birth’. Secondly, the modern ‘landscape’ of birth created and perpetuated fear of childbirth for many of the women. The stories shared were lacking in detail about women’s lives, and did not necessarily help them to become ‘knowers’ and gain wisdom about birthing. Thirdly, the women birthing in the present day were overloaded with information amassed in an attempt to manage their anxieties about birth as well as to fit the role of the informed patient, and demonstrate their competency as mothers. Fourthly the cultural and spiritual significance of birth was not shared in the circulating stories in either generation. Finally, some of the birthing women felt secure in the ‘system’ of birth as constructed, portrayed and sustained in the stories widely circulated. The data revealed that the lifeworld of birth being sustained in stories was one of product and process, concentrating on the stages and progression of labour and the birth of a healthy baby as the only significant outcome. Taken as a whole this thesis revealed that the information gleaned from birth stories did not in fact create meaningful knowledge and understanding about birth for these women. The study is unique in that no other published research has explicitly identified the premise of the ‘modern birth story’ or the notion of ‘idle talk’ in relation to childbirth. Further no other study has considered the phenomenon of engaging with these types of stories whilst pregnant. This study reveals how engaging with the ‘modern birth story’ and the ‘idle talk’ of birth may influence women’s expectations and consequent experience of birth. (shrink)