Hans-Georg Gadamer Research Articles

The Complexity of Freedom of Speech: Wittgenstein’s Language Game and Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

Freedom of speech is filled in various facets of daily life, which has long been the focus of people’s attention and debate. The concept has multiple layers, including mode, content, and timing of speech. It is worth noting that in different cultural, political and legal contexts, different groups of people interpret and apply freedom of speech in various ways. The purpose of this paper is to compare and analyze Austin’s Speech Act Theory, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Language Game Theory and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. Also it aims to demonstrate and summarize three philosophers’ views on freedom of speech from multiple perspectives. By examining these philosophical frameworks, this paper attempts to guide people to further understand the factors that influence freedom of speech and clarify its inherent complexity. This paper not only provides a detailed analysis of the role of language in different contexts, but also provides a relatively complete model for understanding the dynamic interaction between language and society. In the era of globalization, the contradiction between the basic principle and practice of freedom of expression has become increasingly prominent. The results of the paper are intended to provide a reference for future efforts to strengthen intercultural dialogue to guarantee freedom of speech in pluralistic societies.

Between arts-based methods and hermeneutics: Navigating the ethics of participation in research with vulnerable children

Children are underrepresented in research, mainly because of the ethical issues that their participation raises. This is even more true when it comes to marginalized migrant children. For the sake of justice, researchers must think about methods for including children and their families and reflect on the ethics of knowledge building in these contexts. This article returns to the hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer as an interpretation practice which values understanding rather than explanation. It also focuses on the concept of play which can be truth revealing and which is understood as the very being of artistic practices. This allows us to first emphasize the compatibility of hermeneutics and art-based approaches, and their ethical value when it comes to bringing clinical and research issues together. This article highlights that methods based on art and play itself are ethical in the way that they can both provide well-being and reveal a truth that is as useful to the participant as it is to the researcher. This article also addresses how the researcher, in the process of understanding, is “at play” in the research situation which places him in an active role. The play allows a participatory truth to emerge, a truth resulting from a dialogue. This leads us to recognize the ethical value of participation in research with children.

Hans-Georg Gadamer's “On the idea of a system in philosophy” (1924)

ABSTRACT This article is the first English translation of Gadamer's early essay “On the Idea of a System in Philosophy” (“Zur Systemidee in der Philosophie”) from 1924. Influenced by Marburg Neo-Kantianism and Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology, Gadamer is concerned with the problems that arise with the idea of systematicity in philosophy. In particular, he focuses on conceiving of an idea of a system that does justice to the historical variability of philosophical thoughts. He shows that systematicity and history are, in fact, not in tension but deeply intertwined because of the foundation philosophy has in factical and historical human life. Gadamer, therefore, already anticipates some of the most characteristic ideas of his later magnum opus Truth and Method. The translator's Introduction contextualises this essay in both its relation to Marburg Neo-Kantians and Heidegger's thought, highlights the most significant continuities to Gadamer's mature philosophy, and provides an overview of the essay's main arguments.

Edukacyjny wymiar biografii Innych, czyli czego uczy „Roman” Polańskiego?

The aim of this article is to point out the educational potential of biographies of Others. Published and presented in the form of feature films and documentaries, biographies allow today’s cultural participant to “enter the world” of other people, to learn about their dramas and lived trajectories of life. “The other” here is the “bearer” of experience, who provides the viewer, in his or her biographical story, with a certain knowledge of life. Biography can be treated as a text and interpreted as such. A particularly interesting theoretical interpretation to explain the educational dimension of biography is Hans Georg Gadamer’s proposed model of hermeneutic interpretation of the text. The field of analysis in the article became the biography of Roman Polanski.

Understanding the Meaning of Meaning: Origin, Concepts, and Methodological Approaches to Hermeneutics

This paper intends to present the origin, concepts, and methodological approaches in the study of hermeneutics – semantics, semiotics, logical analysis, ontology, and phenomenology – in order to explain the workings of language in human experience. The question of being is the most important question in the whole of philosophy. In parallel, the question of meaning is the most fundamental when it comes to hermeneutics. The research aims to respond to the question of being by means of understanding language. To be able to answer this question, the paper will elaborate the philosophy of language of Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, and his successor at Freiburg, Martin Heidegger. Hans-Georg Gadamer found a way of explicating hermeneutics in which he asserts that truth is beyond method. Paul Ricoeur grafts this assertion to phenomenology through the narrative theory. This paper argues that there is no singular method of understanding the meaning of meaning because the truth makes itself manifest in its different ways of unfolding.

‘Don’t educate me—move me!’ Why we need art and artists (especially films and filmmakers) to love education into existence

Abstract This paper explores the anthropological and ontological conditions of our ‘educational movement’ in aesthetic experience and illustrates these through a range of examples from popular cinema/film (the Empire Strikes Back; Memento; David Lynch’s musings). For the anthropological framing of education, I enlist the help of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and his notion of ‘formation’ as it unfolds in the aesthetic appearance of the cultural world—with film’s moving images’ coming-into-form-and-meaning as my key example. For Gadamer, the artwork’s formative potential is bound up in its capacity to move our senses and intellect into an encounter with what is other to our subjectivity. Drawn into a mode of paying attention to what appears (e.g. in film’s moving images), we are called to lose ourselves and be present in a new way to familiar world objects and relations. The second part of the paper imagines the ontological conditions that make possible our formative movement in the cultural world: the mode of the beautiful. Why do certain artworks shine forth and summon us to be present to them? To pursue this question, I turn to French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s notion of Beauty and craftsmanship. He turns us (like Gadamer) to a neo-Platonic notion of Beauty rooted in St Thomas Aquinas’ notion of the mystery of B/being (i.e. God). In Maritain’s reading, our hermeneutic aesthetic experience—and with that our movement into self-formation—is held in existence through the artist’s participation in the mode of the beautiful and their loss of self in the labour of love of craftsmanship.

The World as Play: Fink, Gadamer, Patočka

Abstract This article explores the idea of ‘play’ as a metaphor to understand the world as an always presupposed frame of all experiences and appearances. A large part of it is devoted to the work of Eugen Fink, who developed a notion of the world as play, as a speculative idea beyond phenomenology. This article argues firstly in favor of such an effort to understand the world as play, as an alternative to onto-theological metaphysics. However, it argues secondly, that a stronger and more convincing concept of play can be found by elaborating on the views of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jan Patočka. Gadamer discussed ‘play’ as a metaphor for art, while Patočka worked on the notion of ‘world’ as a phenomenological idea that serves as a frame for all experiences. A combination of these two ideas may result in a better alternative to both Fink’s approach and to traditional onto-theological metaphysics.

Playing Truth and Metaphorical Reference: The Issue of the Literary Work in the Perspectives of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur

W artykule zostają porównane pojęcia gry i prawdy w koncepcji Hansa- -Georga Gadamera oraz pojęcia referencji i metafory u Paula Ricoeura. Najpierw autor skupia się na Gadamerze, który przedstawia istnienie dzieła sztuki jako grę. Następnie analizuje, w jaki sposób dzieła literackie mogą służyć za nośniki prawdy i czym ta prawda w kontekście dzieła literackiego jest. Po zakończeniu opisu koncepcji Gadamera autor przechodzi do analizy wybranych wątków z teorii hermeneutycznej Ricoeura. Punktem wyjścia jest zagadnienie różnych rodzajów referencji w tekstach. W powiązaniu z referencją poetycką autor opisuje charakterystyczną cechę tekstów poetyckich – metaforę. Kończąca artykuł część porównawcza ma na celu ukazanie relacji między tymi pojęciami w kontekście hermeneutyki obu filozofów.

The Hermeneutics of Translation

The Hermeneutics of Translation: A Translator’s Competence and the Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, as a revised and shortened version of the author’s doctoral thesis in Polish, was translated into English and published in 2021. The book is situated within the contemporary translation study which deals with the question of what determines a successful translation and a competent translator. It aims to find out an answer to the question of the nature of a translator's competence in light of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics.

Gadamer’s Harmonizing Reading of Plato and Aristotle

ABSTRACT Contrary to many contemporary readings of Plato and Aristotle, Hans-Georg Gadamer sees harmony in their thought. A challenge to this reading is that Aristotle criticizes Plato’s forms and the good. Aware of these criticisms, Gadamer understands these two thinkers as having significant commonalities and pursuing related goals. Gadamer’s interpretation is less a historical approach than an attempt to explain and justify aspects of his own philosophical views, in particular those regarding the relation between metaphysics and practical thought. We critically examine Gadamer’s interpretation and consider tensions between its more radical conclusions and a more conventional Platonism.

HANS GEORG GADAMER'S HERMENEUTICS VS BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

At first, Hermeneutics as an interacting science was only used among the church as a method of Scripture Interpretation, with a standard system or method of hermeneutics. This hermeneutics is often referred to as Traditional Hermeneutics or Biblical Hermeneutics. However, in its development, Hermeneutics came out of biblical studies into the scope of philosophy, art, literature, and history. This hermeneutics is referred to as New Hermeneutics and appears in various variants. The purpose of this article is to introduce the New Hermeneutics system of the Postmodernist era, specifically Hans Georg Gadamer's Hermeneutics, and compare it objectively with the Biblical Hermeneutics System with the standard Grammatical-Historical method, which is often used to interpret the Bible. This study uses the comparative analysis study method to find fundamental similarities and differences between Hans Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic concepts and Biblical hermeneutics. Finally, the author makes conclusions and recommendations for Bible interpreters who are doing hermeneutics.

Re-imagining Artists’ Relationships with the Past: Recreation, Attention, Transformation

This article explores the potentialities of relationships between artist-researchers and the artworks/artists that inform their research. Seeking approaches to optimize artists’ engagement with works from the past, including recreative practice, it considers experiences of researchers in relation to emerging patterns and themes. The challenges and joys of engaging with the work of previous artists are illustrated. Finally, researchers’ approaches to artworks are considered in relation to aesthetic attentiveness in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s aesthetic hermeneutics to suggest synchronicities. When considered as examples of aesthetic hermeneutics, these experiences may prompt, illuminate, and enrich practices of future artist-researchers and further understanding of Gadamer’s aesthetics.

Misunderstanding and Meaning Change

AbstractToday, the tone of discussion in the public sphere is dominated by misunderstanding. A common assumption is that misunderstanding comes from a failure of understanding. This article argues that misunderstanding is in fact a type of meaning change. To fully understand the contrast between misunderstanding as a failure of understanding and misunderstanding as a type of meaning change, the article uses Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hans-Georg Gadamer as a starting point to tease out an unthought assumption. Both thinkers challenge traditional preconceptions of how language shapes understanding and they make prominent use of the concept of misunderstanding to do so. Yet both rely on a de facto model of misunderstanding as a failure of understanding. To consider an alternative notion of misunderstanding, the article looks at examples from thinkers influenced by Wittgenstein's and Gadamer's philosophy. Finally, the article concludes by positing a new definition of misunderstanding.

Sartre and the Phenomenology of Pain: A Closer Look

Conventionally distinguished as a problem for medical professionals, experiences of embodied pain have prompted a significant set of themes and perspectives in the Continental tradition of philosophy. The discipline of phenomenology, in particular, offers thought-provoking approaches for understanding the fullness and diversity of living one’s pain in everyday life. In contrast to scientific practices that tend to take for granted the subjective structures of human consciousness in action, the phenomenological framework of lived experience offers profoundly subtle accounts for explaining how a person’s pain alters their ways of relating to themselves, to others, and to the wider world around them. In recent years, scholars of phenomenology have undertaken extensive research on the complex relationality between health and human consciousness, including the behavioral grids and existential textures that come with that relationship. Greatly influenced by twentieth century phenomenology, this new development in the scholarship has undergone three distinct waves. The first wave focused on the work of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer to develop a hermeneutic of healthcare practice; the second wave incorporated Maurice Merleau-Ponty to understand illness from an increasingly carnal point of view; and the third and most recent wave has relied primarily on Edmund Husserl to construct the intentionality involved with the consciousness of pain.

Is Generative AI Ready to Join the Conversation That We Are?

In this article, I use the dialogical ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer to evaluate whether generative AI is ready to join the ontological conversation that he considers humanity to be. Despite the technical advances of generative AI, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics reveals that it cannot function as a proxy human dialogue partner in pursuit of understanding. Even when free from anthropomorphic projections and reimagined as the “other”, generative AI is found to have a weak epistemology, lack of moral awareness, and no emotions. Even so, it evokes a response in some users that places it on the threshold of being. The most promising dialogical role identified for generative AI is as a digital form of Gadamerian “text” currently constrained by copyright and technical design. Generative AI’s shortcomings risk inhibiting hermeneutical understanding through greater access to summarised knowledge. Nonetheless, the new technology is on the brink of joining the ontological conversation of humanity.

Dialogue, Horizon and Chronotope: Using Bakhtin’s and Gadamer’s Ideas to Frame Online Teaching and Learning

The information explosion and digital modes of learning often combine to inform the quest for the best ways of transforming information in digital form for pedagogical purposes. This quest has become more urgent and pervasive with the ‘turn’ to online learning in the context of COVID-19. This can result in linear, asynchronous, transmission-based modes of teaching and learning which commodify, package and deliver knowledge for individual ‘customers’. The primary concerns in such models are often technical and economic – technology as a cost-effective ‘solution’ to educational challenges. In this paper I argue for the importance of dialogic learning space in teaching and learning by means of Information and Communication Technologies, whether in the form of fully online learning, blended learning or face-to-face encounters using ICT affordances. Although the 20th Century theorists Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) produced their seminal works before the advent of ICTs, they were both concerned with the quality and authenticity of human engagement with texts and with other persons and contexts. Besides a shared interest in dialogue as an ontological feature of human life and being, they both used spatiotemporal concepts for understanding and interpreting texts. The article draws on Gadamer’s notions of dialogue and horizon, and Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and chronotope, to conceptualize dialogic possibilities for online education. Its purpose is to provide a framework, grounded in Bakhtin’s and Gadamer’s ideas, for a dialogic approach to online teaching and learning in higher education.

The Meaning of Text Visualization in Contemporary Paintings in West Sumatra

Within two decades in West Sumatra, some artists' paintings contain visualization of letters, numbers, sentences, which are sometimes arranged scattered, even upside down. This is unusual considering that contemporary painting has developed into more sophisticated forms. This research aims to explore the meaning of text visualization in contemporary paintings of artists in West Sumatra. This research uses descriptive qualitative method with Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic approach. The object of study was selected based on purpose sampling, namely the paintings of Syahrial, Yasrul Sami, Yon Indra and Dika Adrian. The results showed that the meaning of Syahrial's painting text hints at a critical mindset in viewing the reality of life facing the value conventions of Western theories that give distance to the mindset of the community towards culture. The meaning of the text in Yasrul Sami's painting is a representation of the inner and psychological self over the problems of life. The meaning of Yon Indra's painting text leads to the essence of the attitude and mindset of the younger generation. The meaning of the text of Dika Adrian's paintings, leads to cultural consumption, social context and environment of today's young generation. From the results of the research, it can be concluded that the text in the paintings has personal meaning and social meaning. The difference in the way the text visualization is expressed in the work has an influence on cross-generational cultural consumption.

GADAMER’S PHENOMENOLOGICAL AESTHETICS IN THE CONTEXT OF TIMBRE ANALYSIS OF TEXT

The article explores the phenomenological aesthetics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, specifically focusing on its application in the context of timbral text analysis. The study thoroughly investigates how Gadamer’s phenomenological perspective can enhance the understanding and interpretation of texts, by viewing them as intricate, multi-layered constructs that require analysis of their emotional and expressive elements. The authors delve into such fundamental concepts, as the fusion of the author’s and reader’s horizons, the hermeneutic circle, and the dynamic nature of these horizons within timbral analysis. A significant portion of the paper is dedicated to examining the role of historical context and personal preconceptions in the interpretation process. It underscores the importance of acknowledging historical and cultural horizons to achieve a comprehensive understanding of texts. The article presents an innovative approach to the interpretation of literary texts, merging Gadamer’s phenomenological aesthetics with timbral analysis techniques. This research redefines traditional text analysis methodologies by attempting to bridge the gap between philosophical aesthetics and practical text analysis. This work offers a novel perspective on text analysis and interpretation. The authors’ approach not only deepens the understanding of Gadamer’s phenomenology but also demonstrates its utility in text analysis. The study is poised to influence future research in text interpretation, encouraging a more nuanced and holistic approach that takes into consideration both the aesthetic and emotional components of texts, as well as the cultural and historical context in which they are embedded.

A Hermeneutic Approach to the Formation of a Secular Culture in Modern Israel

ABSTRACT The creation of the state of Israel was the outcome of the Zionist movement, which originated in Europe and was itself inspired by fundamental European ideas—Enlightenment, national self-determination, democracy and socialism. From its earliest days Zionism was primarily a secular movement that rejected the religious establishment and religious way of life of the Jews in the Diaspora. In many respects, however, the founders of the state and the principles on which they founded its institutions—the political, judicial, economic, social, and educational—were rooted in the ethical values and cultural practices of the Jewish tradition which they had apparently rejected. To explain this complex process of secularization of a very ancient religious and cultural tradition—which many see as an unresolved or unresolvable conflict between two opposing systems of thought—I draw on the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer and especially on his Truth and Method (1960). Culture, according to Gadamer, is a continuous flow of tradition within what he called “the horizon.” People, he argued, create and live within a given cultural tradition, but they are at the same time its interpreters, enlarging it by adopting elements from various cultures and ideologies, or “horizons.” From this hermeneutic perspective, the founders of modern Israel and their successors were the active interpreters of the Jewish tradition within the larger historical context of the European Enlightenment. I illustrate this process of cultural interpretation by focusing on the secularization of the Jewish holidays, specifically on the way the Kibbutz movement, a leading symbol of the new Israel, re-interpretated Jewish holidays like Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost) and Yom Kippur, and gave these religious festivals a secular-Israeli content. However, this dynamic pioneering stage of secularization may be said to have ended by the 1980s. From then on, the secular identity of Israeli society has been undergoing a variety of radical changes.

An untimely vocation: Gadamer’s ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf. Über den Ruf und Beruf der Wissenschaft in unserer Zeit’ (1943)

Abstract On 27 September 1943, Hans-Georg Gadamer published a brief but significant article in the conservative newspaper Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten und Handels-Zeitung, entitled ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf. Über den Ruf und Beruf der Wissenschaft in unserer Zeit’ (Science as Vocation: On the Calling and Profession of Science in Our Time). The article, which addressed the problem of the value and status of science and philosophy in the midst of the Second World War, was never reprinted in Gadamer’s work, neither in the ten volumes of his collected writings published by Mohr Siebeck, nor separately in books or journals. I offer here a critical introduction to the context and main contents of this text due to its philosophical, political, and historical relevance. In particular, the introduction analyses Gadamer’s confrontation with his own time through explicit and implicit references to Max Weber’s 1917 lecture, ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ (Science as Vocation), and traces echoes in Gadamer’s later works that bear on contemporary challenges. Following that, I present the first English translation of Gadamer’s original German text.