Gadamer's Hermeneutics Research Articles

Nursing care and understanding the experiences of others: a Gadamerian perspective

A personal and professional issue that confronts all nurses is that of attempting to understand the experiences of our patients or clients. The position taken here is that understanding another person as a human being is much more than being able to explain their experience according to a particular model of ill-health. Rather, it is an issue of human dignity and respectfulness. Gadamerian hermeneutics has been used in nursing research to articulate the process of understanding and to develop interpretations of particular experiences. Gadamer's exposition of understanding shows that we need to be aware that our understanding of other people is developed through a fusion of our own history, language and culture with that of the other person. This occurs through a hermeneutic question-answer dialogue in which we put our ideas at risk of being modified or rejected in the process. Understanding then, is a perceptual and conceptual process in which we fully participate. In this way, the experience of understanding those we nurse increases our understanding of ourselves as well as enhancing our ability to further understand others.

The Subjectivity of Effective History and the Suppressed Husserlian Elements in Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics

This essay makes two claims. The first, exegetical, point shows that there are Husserlian elements in Gadamer's hermeneutics that are usually overlooked. The second, systematic, claim takes issue with the fact that Gadamer saw himself in alliance with the project of the later Heidegger. It would have been more fruitful had Gadamer aligned himself with Husserl and the Enlightenment tradition. Following Heidegger in his concept of history, Gadamer risks betraying the main tenets of the Enlightenment by shifting the weight from subjectivity to effective history as the agent in history. This is not a wholesale dismissal of Gadamer's project, however. The problem in Gadamer's effective history can be remedied by insisting, with Husserl, on the subjective character of effective history. Gadamer was right to criticize Husserl's idea of a transcendental genesis, but went too far in giving up the idea of human subjectivity as the ageni in history.

Art and History in Gadamer's Hermeneutics

This paper discusses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of what he sees as a major change in the approach to the Western philosophical and aesthetic traditions that began in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the results of this change today. According to Gadamer, these traditions ceased to be binding at this time and became objects of historical research. Instead of being seen even as potential sources of insight, traditional knowledge claims and works of art were subjected to historical and aesthetic analysis. And Gadamer holds that these approaches have partially come to encompass the present as well. Thus, modern art has often downplayed cognitive and pedagogical tasks in proceeding in a purely aesthetic, playful way. And the study of history has been seen as providing insight into the contextually determined nature of presuppositions, those of the modern age included. According to Gadamer, this unduly limits the possibilities of both art and history to provide learning.

Considerations from the development of a local spatial data infrastructure

The development of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) is often the victim of an excessive focus on data and standards. In this paper we use the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Habermas to understand the problem of how SDIs can succeed. We use Gadamer's concept of phronesis to show how being an application-driven project is a key to success, and draw on Habermas's ideas to show the importance of emancipatory knowledge in the implementation of SDIs. A case study on a geographic information system (GIS) project in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is presented. The project has been evolving for 15 years; it started with a focus on data and standards and generated a strong and active spatial data infrastructure for the city. The reasons for success were many; here we highlight the application-driven nature of the project, along with the combination of multiple disciplines and multiple levels of expertise in its design and implementation team. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Searching for the enriching sense of otherness: The psychoanalytic psychotherapist as a meaning-bearing other

This paper is a theoretical and clinical examination of the patient's search for the otherness of the therapist as a prerequisite for change and development in relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy. A basic assumption is that being in a relationship as well as being a personal self, is to be understood, as being with a “meaning-bearing other”; that is, someone who allows for the possibility of meaningful thoughts and feelings, either through an actual communicative presence or as a consciously, prereflective, or unconsciously imagined communication partner. The term “meaning-bearing other” is used to differentiate distinct, although often synchronic, modes of relatedness. The need for intersubjective “depth”—that is, to discover the otherness of the other, and for oneself to be recognized as an experiencing subject—is regarded as a main motivational force. Winnicott's, as well as Sullivan's developmental approaches, Mitchell and Aron's views on psychoanalytic interaction, and Heidegger and Gadamer's phenomenology and hermeneutics are used as theoretical points of reference for the present discourse. The theoretical points of view are examined and discussed through excerpts from twice-a-week psychotherapy with a six-year old girl.

Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (review)

Reviewed by: Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production Sergio Sanabria (bio) Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. By Dalibor Vesely. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. xviii+506. $49.95. Important, erudite, dense, turgidly written, this complex assembly of several related tracts investigates how architecture has yielded a central autonomous role to technology and its instrumental values since the eighteenth century. The book joins a distinguished line of pessimistic assessments of technology, led by Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1954; English translation 1964). Since 1968, its author, Dalibor Vesely, has disseminated his views as studio instructor at the Architecture Association in London and later at Cambridge University, and is the éminence grise behind Alberto Pérez-Gómez's Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983). This, his first book, establishes Vesely's firm claim to a central and controversial position in postmodern architectural theory. Vesely argues that purely instrumental geometric modes of representation ("emancipated" from the world they stand for) used by contemporary architects and engineers sacrifice values once explicit in traditional Western culture, where reality and its optical representations emerged from an embedded participation in the world. In chapters 1 and 2, he grounds this claim philosophically in his interpretation of Hans Gadamer's hermeneutics of communicative space, and what seems to this reviewer a much less convincing discussion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological psychology. He argues that the Enlightenment program for mathematical precision excluded humanistic values from the unity of knowing, forcing two mutually exclusive visions of reality: "Because any representation, despite its claims to universality, is inevitably partial, there is always a residuum of reality left out, which has to define its own mode of representation. The result is a duplication that may be best described as 'divided representation'" (p. 177). The world in Vesely's (and Gadamer's) view has a latent structure in which all thinking, language, and even space must be situationally embedded: "Communication . . . takes place in a world that is already to some extent articulated, acting as a background for any possible communication or interpretation" (p. 215). In chapters 3 and 4, Vesely examines earlier approaches to representation in the science of optics and its applications in the visual arts of the late Gothic, the Renaissance, and the baroque. Optical treatises of Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon show that thirteenth-century science supported an ontological role, incorporating Proclus's and Plotinus's Neoplatonic vision of light as intelligible substance and radiance of the Divine. The ontological role of light shifted in the Renaissance work of Alberti, Ghiberti, Piero della Francesca, Luca Pacioli, and Leonardo to an equally metaphysical role for proportion in the optico-geometric construction of perspective. While [End Page 659] Renaissance perspective laid the ground for later illusional technical representation, its geometric language still conveyed a symbolic representation of the world. But perspective generated a shift to internalized subjectivity that Vesely connects to Descartes's cogito and early autonomous mathematical physical models, exemplified in Johannes Kepler's cosmology. Vesely incisively discusses parallels in baroque architectural theory and practice in Guarino Guarini's chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin and Johann Michael Fischer's abbey church at Zwiefalten that preserved ancient unified paradigms alongside advanced mathematical innovations. Vesely's intellectual horizon seems most comfortably situated here, in the circle of Gottfried Leibniz and his artistic contemporaries. Chapters 5 and 6 cover the absorption of techniques by theory, and the emancipation of instrumental thinking. Vesely's discomfort with modernity begins with Newton's mathematization of motion, paralleled in Claude Perrault's severing of architecture from European metaphysical tradition and grounding it in personal taste. Vesely troublingly dichotomizes a reductive scientism, where instrumentality (techne) becomes self-sufficient, from what he views as a richer traditional symbolic mediation (poiesis) between universals and embodied beings. He offers a brief but sharply focused history of positivistic inroads in science and architecture, from Pierre-Simon Laplace and the group of Auteuil to Jean-Nicolas Durand's universal architectural design methods based on typology and Gottfried Semper's project for an architectural science inspired...

Ethnography and Hermeneutics in Cybercultural Research Accessing IRC Virtual Communities

This article suggests a qualitative methodological framework and a holistic-historicistic epistemological perspective that balances the sociopsychological and cultural dimensions of IRC Virtual Communities. CMC cultural research should not be focused on intercultural collision phenomena alone, but also on cultural construction from inside the Net. An ethnographic strategy discovering cybercultures together with Gadamer's hermeneutics for the interpretation of systems of meanings are the proposed tools for understanding “virtual” life and cultural production within the Net.

Rorty, ‘Historicism’ and the practice of history: A polemic

Rorty's extravagant postures on hermeneutics and incommensurability seem ultimately irreconcilable with the practical exigencies of historical interpretation. This essay highlights Rorty's views on historical reconstruction to demonstrate his ironic relation to historical practice. To make the case fully, it situates Rorty's views on historical method within his larger campaign against the distinctiveness of the ‘interpretive’ approach to human studies. In particular, the essay contests his claim for support from Gadamerian hermeneutics. The object is to expose the sort of ‘conversation’ he envisions as falling far short of the authentic dialogue with the past he professes to recognize as essential for contemporary culture.

Hermenêutica e Materialismo Histórico na Encruzilhada da História

This paper intends to approach Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical view of history to Walter Benjamin’s dialectical concept of it, choosing, as a contrasting point of view, historicism, which overlaps fact by comprehension on behalf of a so-called scientific neutrality. To the impossibility of ignoring the “being-there” of the historian, peculiar to gadamerian hermeneutics, Benjamin adds both the presuppositions of historical materialism and the concept of time present in Jewish-Christian theology and Jewish mystics, turning History into science and remembrance, conservation and redemption.

Sustaining well-being and enabling recovery: The therapeutic effect of nurse friendliness on clients and nursing environments

A variety of studies identify friendliness/being friendly in their findings however, no research reports on the phenomenon of nurse friendliness. Moreover, all prior findings are coincidental to the phenomenon under investigation, so nurse friendliness is superficially represented and poorly understood. In turn, the significance of nurse friendliness has gone unnoticed. Because the present study focused on nurse friendliness, it revealed a deeper dimension to this phenomenon and expanded prior, limited understandings.This study, conducted in 2003, used Gadamerian hermeneutics to explore 12 clients' encounters with friendly nurses. Findings reveal that nurse friendliness results in mutuality, humour, fondness and reciprocity, in purposeful and thoughtful nursing action, and in a light-hearted environment where clients feel affirmed, included and uplifted. Because of this, nurse friendliness sustains clients and enables their recovery. In revealing the phenomenon of nurse friendliness, this study findings add to knowledge regarding the therapeutic potential and significance of nurse–client relationships.

The Unknown Before Discovery

Starting from the most important conquests of contemporary post-positivistic epistemology and from its authors such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Edgar Morin and going through Gadamer's hermeneutics or Wittgenstein and de Mandeville's approaches to scientific and social paradigms, this article focuses on the limits of scientific dogmas and on the overbearing rationalism that claims to explain everything, marginalizing many aspects of human life which cannot be rationalized. The scientific approach cannot be just conceptual. It must be opened to images and unusual connections. The scientist must concentrate his or her attention on limit-matters that are often unpredictable and go beyond the logical-philosophical field toward the metaphysical one. “I did not know I did not know” realized von Foerster, and aware of that, the scientist should become the specialist of the unknown, moving along the border-figures of science and philosophy.

Hermeneutics and the culture of birds: the environmental allegory of ‘easter island’

It has become commonplace to interpret ‘Easter Island’ in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others’ edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as ‘given’ (fixed) and exemplary, wrongly suggesting that meanings and morals, like islands, are there to be ‘discovered’ ready-formed. Gadamer's hermeneutics suggests an alternative understanding which expresses something of the ethical ambiguities involved in giving meaning to the environmental history of Easter Island.

The Primacy of Interpretation in Luigi Pareyson’s Hermeneutics of Common Sense

In her essay Re-Interpreting Hermeneutics: U-topias from the Continent, Donatella Di Cesare poses a decisive question, more important than ever for philosophy today: if philosophy were to become a koine, what price would it pay? In line with Gianni Vattimo's thesis that hermeneutics has become a idiom of Western culture in the past few decades, what is the price that hermeneutics has already paid?1 The need for precision is that touches upon philosophy at its core, linking this current endeavor to the larger narrative of philosophy that includes, of course, its own dissolution and recovery. Such endeavors are not new, but are bound by a sort of kindredness, a family resemblance that allows for originality even when philosophy skulks beneath the weight of conceptual hand-me-downs that too often result in imitation or irony rather than a genuine reappraisal of philosophy's role in human life. And this is the trouble with the koine and our recovery from it: the way to resuscitate philosophy as hermeneutics, and hermeneutics as philosophy, may rest not in the confines of philosophy alone, but in its connection to everyday lifein the very heart of the chaotic rabble from which philosophy all too often attempts an escape. Di Cesare's question not only points to the possible advantages of this reappraisal, but more importantly, to the dire consequences of not justifying the relevance of philosophy's role in contemporary life. I want to take the occasion of this response to focus specifically on the vital task confronting philosophy in the face of everyday wisdom that has traditionally been known as common (sensus communis). I will reflect specifically on Luigi Pareyson's 1971 work, Truth and Interpretation, and in particular the work's final chapter where he demonstrates the necessary connection between philosophy (and especifically, philosophical hermeneutics) and everyday experience, human pursuits, and even to the legacy of the great Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico.2 Di Cesare has, through the lens of Heidelberg, effectively shed light upon the Italian style of hermeneutics through a critique of its misplaced nihilism, focusing specifically on the importance of and the experience of struck by something (Anstoss) characteristic of Gadamer's hermeneutics. In response, I would like to drag the debate back into the dark, foggy confines of Turin in order to push a more Pareysonian reading of the task that confronts a philosophical hermeneutics based not on understanding and struck, but on interpretation and kindredness (congenialita). My contention is that if hermeneutics begins with understanding rather than interpretation, it can never become a philosophical hermeneutics that submits its own presuppositions to critique. Faced with the koine of hermeneutics, how can we make hermeneutics, now become idiom, philosophical again? Is the koine of interpretation the inevitable result of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics and its claim to the universality of interpretative understanding? Rather than claim the primacy of understanding, I will argue that Pareyson's reflection on sense emphasizes the circular reciprocity between philosophy and experience, that is, between interpretation and understanding. Gadamer on the Sensus Communis Gadamer's outline of the guiding concepts of the human sciences in the first section of Truth and Method serves not only to differentiate these sciences from the natural sciences, but also to prepare the reader for the type of truth that Gadamer sees, in the broadest sense, as hermeneutic. His work in the first section, then, is not merely a preface to the core of his argument; it is, more importantly, the conceptuai groundwork that will make any application of such a truth to the human sciences possible. In Part I of Truth and Method (The Question of Truth as it Emerges in the Experience of Art), Gadamer aims to explain the mode of being of the work of art and introduce the concept of Erfahrung as a replacement for Erlebnis to describe the aesthetic experience, and consequently, the nature of truth in the human sciences. …

Gadamer on the Relation Between Philosophy and Its History

This article asks what Gadamerian hermeneutics can contribute to recent debates about how philosophy is related to its history. First, I explain how Gadamer understands this relation, paying particular attention to his debts to Heidegger and to the role of tradition in the human sciences. Next, I argue that Gadamer's view raises serious difficulties-difficulties connected with what he calls historical consciousness. Finally, I try to respond to these difficulties by distinguishing two different ways of understanding what historians of philosophy do. While my response is in some tension with what Gadamer explicitly says about the history of philosophy, it is, I argue, consistent with the spirit of his work.

How Hermeneutical is He? A Gadamerian Analysis of Richard Rorty

In the final section of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty refers hermeneutics as what will happen once we give up our futile attempts at trying be epistemological. Two of the concepts, and conversation, he develops there substantiate his claims about the viability of hermeneutics remain central in subsequent writings.1 But in what sense are these specifically hermeneutical concepts? Since both have their roots in a Gadamerian hermeneutics,2 I will compare them Gadamer's conceptions, horizon and dialogue, respectively.3 My purpose is show how Rorty's vocabulary glosses over important and deep hermeneutical assumptions made by Gadamer, and that it is Rorty's failure complete his hermeneutical turn that leads some problematic conclusions, conclusions that even Rorty is uncomfortable with. Both Rorty and Gadamer agree that we cannot make sense of what it means attain a position neutral toward our own (Gadamer's term) or (Rorty's term). Rorty builds on Gadamer's claims about the ubiquity of tradition in order emphasize that being fully grounded in one's own community pre-establishes who one regards as adequate interlocutors. To those outside of one's community one simply does not feel the need justify oneself. Rorty names Nazis and three-year olds as examples of those falling into this category. According Rorty, one always has in mind the group of people whom one believes one must justify oneself. This provides him with his definition of ethno-centrism, which he uses modify his earlier use of Ethno-centrism means: to divide up the human race into the people whom one must justify one's beliefs and the others. The first group-one's ethnos-comprises those who share enough of one's beliefs make fruitful conversation possible (Rorty 1991: 30). One is happily ethno-centric when one admits that there is no or meta-audience whom one can justify oneself but only audiences one deems competent, based on the assumptions of one's very own community. Admitting the circularity implied therein, Rorty retorts that this is a circularity no-one can avoid. Consequently, instead of directing our philosophical energy towards justifying ourselves an ideal or universal community, Rorty advocates that we use our energy justify ourselves our own local, contingent community. Practically, this means that rather than putting our faith in the possibility of achieving rational convergence with all humanity past, present and future-the of traditional philosophy-we should spend our energy cultivating hope, a hope that our liberal community will triumph and spread inclusion rather than exclusion, tolerance rather than violence. True his pragmatic sensibilities, Rorty conjectures that the real fear behind forsaking epistemological commitments is that it will lead political chaos. We may not, for example, be able justify Western enlightenment liberalism against totalitarianism. That is say, there is no possibility for a non-circular argument that proves our starting point is better than the Nazi's. Contextually-based opinions are all we can garner demonstrate (as opposed rationally argue) that liberalism is better than totalitarianism. Rorty insists that rather than seeking metaphysical comfort by vainly attempting construct a universally valid foundation, what we need instead is develop hope, bravery, and honesty face up the fact that there is no non-circular argument in defense of any belief. It is Rorty's emphasis that there is no justification period (i.e., an community) only justification for us (i.e., local communities) that leads him deny that changes of belief amongst communities can be rational. This is due the fact that rationality is so wedded the internal norms and assumptions of a community that when it comes substantive change amongst communities the difference between reasons and causes collapses: There is . …

O lugar da história em tempos de crise

After the crisis of the historiographic models of the 70's and 80's, characterized by a mutual fragmentation of objects and the subject, a new interest for this last one was created and accomplished through the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur. My article intends to examine this alternative, taking into consideration the permanence of modern social processes of autonomization, through which a kind of "automatic subject" dominates and involves individual agents. A free and conscious subject is only possible under the circumstance of a crisis like the present one, making of it the decisive opportunity for a critical reorganization of the entire system composed by identities and differences that constitute social existence and historical conscience.

Gadamer's repercussions: reconsidering philosophical hermeneutics

Acknowledgments Preface Introduction. From Word to Concept: The Task of Hermeneutics as Philosophy Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by Richard E. Palmer I. GADAMER'S INFLUENCE 1. After Historicism, Is Metaphysics Still Possible? On Hans-Georg Gadamer's 100th Birthday Jurgen Habermas, translated by Paul Malone 2. Being That Can Be Understood Is Language Richard Rorty 3. On the Coherence of Hermeneutics and Ethics: An Essay on Gadamer and Levinas Gerald L. Bruns 4. Gadamer and Romanticism Andrew Bowie 5. Literature, Law, and Morality Georgia Warnke 6. A Critique of Gadamer's Aesthetics Michael Kelly II. GADAMER AND DIALOGUE 7. On Dialogue: To Its Cultured Despisers Donald G. Marshall 8. Gadamer's Philosophy of Dialogue and Its Relation to the Postmodernism of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Strauss Ronald Beiner 9. Meaningless Hermeneutics? Joel Weinsheimer III. GADAMER IN QUESTION 10. Radio Nietzsche, or, How to Fall Short of Philosophy Geoff Waite 11. The Art of Allusion: Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Interventions under National Socialism Teresa Orozco, translated by Jason Gaiger 12. On the Politics of Gadamerian Hermeneutics: A Response to Orozco and Waite Catherine H. Zuckert 13. The Protection of the Philosophical Form: Response to Zuckert Teresa Orozco, translated by Paul Malone 14. Salutations: Response to Zuckert Geoff Waite Contributors Index

The Ideal Explanatory Text in History: A Plea for Ecumenism

ABSTRACTThis article presents Peter Railton's analysis of scientific explanation and discusses its application in historiography. Although Railton thinks covering laws are basic in explanation, his account is far removed from Hempel. The main feature of Railton's account is its ecumenism. The “ideal explanatory text,” a central concept in Railton's analysis, has room for not only causal and intentional, but also structural and functional explanations. The essay shows this by analyzing a number of explanations in history. In Railton's terminology all information that reduces our insecurity as to what the explanandum is due is explanatory. In the “encyclopedic ideal explanatory text,” different kinds of explanation converge in the explanandum from different starting points. By incorporating pragmatic aspects, Railton's account is well suited to show how explanations in historiography can be explanatory despite their lack of covering laws or tendency statements. Railton's account is also dynamic, showing how the explanatory quest is a never‐ending search for better illumination of the ideal explanatory text. Railton's analysis is briefly compared to, and found compatible with, views on explanation presented by David Lewis, C. Behan McCullagh, and R. G. Collingwood. Confronted with Hans‐Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics and Donald Davidson's insistence on the indeterminacy of interpretation, the essay suggests that the objectivity of the ideal explanatory text should be regarded as local, limited to the description under which the action is seen.

Ricoeur's Account of Tradition and the Gadamer–Habermas Debate

While it is clear that the Gadamer–Habermas debate has had a major influence on Paul Ricoeur, his commentators have had little to say about the nature of this influence. I try to remedy this silence by showing that Ricoeur's account of tradition is a direct response to the Gadamer–Habermas debate. First, I briefly explain the debate's importance and describe Ricoeur's reaction to it. Next, I show how his discussion of tradition in Time and Narrative steers a middle course between Gadamerian hermeneutics and Habermasian Ideologiekritik. Finally, I raise some critical questions about the adequacy of Ricoeur's middle course. Specifically, I argue that it rests on an implausible distinction between the form and the content of tradition.

An emerging framework for human becoming criticism.

This column presents a new framework for researchers to consider as a guide when participating in the process of scholarly critique. The framework is aligned with the philosophical view of Gadamerian hermeneutics. The emerging framework, consistent with the human becoming school of thought, builds on ideas from literary theory, specifically reception or reader-response theory, and the human becoming hermeneutic method. Three processes- sketching the horizon of expectation, illuminating artistic disclosure, and enhancing the original with artform-guide reviewers to bring forth the contributions of the researcher and to enhance the researcher's contribution with artform. The emerging framework will enable researchers to participate in interpretive discourse and to advance the understanding of a scholarly community.