The paper applies Gadamerian hermeneutics to everyday situations of nonverbal social interaction in the urban space. First, relevant aspects of urban encounters are briefly discussed with philosophical hermeneutics’ relation to nonverbal communication and bodily understanding. Second, hermeneutic understanding is presented as conversation, and the ethical implications of hermeneutics are articulated: as philosophical practice, Gadamerian hermeneutics is about intensifying the voice of the other. There is a demand for mutual openness towards otherness. Connected to this attitude required for hermeneutic encounters are (...) the ideas of a cosmopolitan public sphere and an inclusive hermeneutic community. After attending to these, the value of specifically urban encounters can be articulated. Urban context and built environment can in good circumstances assist in encountering the other hermeneutically. The passing communicative situations can be negotiations of meanings and values, instances of public sphere. The urban mass society with its crowds has potentiality to enact an inclusive hermeneutic community. To conclude, the consequences of our failures to engage hermeneutically with each other are discussed in a plea for hermeneutic openness. (shrink)

Much debate has been held over the question of whether Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic approach to ethics and the other can do justice to the alterity of the other, as exemplified in Emmanuel Levinas’s approach to ethics as first philosophy. The challenge to Gadamer and to hermeneutics more generally, comes obliquely from Levinas and more directly, from Robert Bernasconi, who argues that Gadamer cannot account for an otherness that ends in incomprehensibility as one finds in encounters between persons of asymmetrical power (...) relations—oppressed and oppressor, privileged and marginalized. Bernasconi’s critique has resulted in a flurry of hermeneutic responses that insist that Gadamer’s hermeneutics can, if understood in the right way, accommodate the other and serve as the foundation for robust ethical treatment of the other. I argue in this paper that participants in this debate have been insufficiently attentive to the ontologies that underlie the accounts of self and other in Gadamer and in Levinas. Because Gadamer and Levinas begin from different ontologies, their accounts of ethics and of the ground of ethics differ. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with Gadamer’s reflections on solidarity and practice as found in several of his later writings. While Gadamer offers a robust explanation of practice, practical reason, and how both are operative in solidarities, his investigations of solidarity are in no way systematic. He does, however, distinguish two aspects of solidarity, viz. what one might call “natural solidarity” and “avowed solidarity”. In contrast to natural solidarities, avowed solidarities require an intentional decision and commitment to act with others for (...) a common cause. Since Gadamer’s writings on solidarity are more sketches than detailed treatises, we will bring his work into dialogue with feminist and political philosopher Sally Scholz. Scholz has devoted significant research to the concept of political solidarity. Like Gadamer, Scholz too is concerned with how we engage natural others and how our present practices harm and exploit them. By bringing Scholz’s and Gadamer’s work into dialogue, we gain a better understanding of different facets and types of solidarity, how they interrelate and influence one other, and how their interrelations might help to effect positive social and political changes for all who inhabit this world. (shrink)

This essay argues that there are educational situations in which interlocutionary misbehaviour in the form of withholding ‘good will’ can have educational value. It describes an exchange between a teacher and a student in which the teacher withheld good will, and analyzes this exchange through conceptual frameworks of performative contradiction and differend, provided by Derrida and Lyotard, respectively. It further analyzes how context, power, and ethical considerations affect the evaluation of instances of interlocutionary misbehaviour. The essay ends with the ironic (...) observation that even in cases in which refusing to extend good will to one's interlocutor is educationally pertinent, good will is not absent from the exchange altogether. (shrink)

This article makes the political dimension of Gadamer's thought more explicit by examining the interplay of three concepts in his work: solidarity, friendship, and the other. Focusing primarily on certain post--"Truth and Method" writings, I argue that Gadamer's conception of solidarity has to do with historically contingent manifestations of bonds that reflect a civic life together of reciprocal co-perception. These bonds go beyond conscious recognition of observable similarities and differences and emerge from encounters among those who are, and remain, in (...) important ways other to each other. I make this case through an analysis of Gadamer's phenomenology of friendship and the crucial role of otherness in his accounts of both understanding and friendship. I suggest that Gadamer's political thought gives us a way of conceptualizing solidarity and otherness without making the other same or leaving the other completely other. (shrink)