Hermeneutic Techniques Research Articles

Apology of Socratic Studies

In this paper, we defend Socratic studies as a research programme against several recent attacks, including at least one recently published in Polis (by William Prior). Critics have argued that the study of Socrates, based upon evidence mostly or entirely derived from some set of Plato’s dialogues, is sfounded upon faulty and indefensible historical or hermeneutical technique. We begin by identifying what we believe are the foundational principles of Socratic studies, as the field has been pursued in recent years, and we then show how the research programme that derives from accepting these principles is not defeated by any of the most common recent criticisms of it. Specifically, we argue that challenges to sorting Plato’s dialogues by date, more general challenges to historicist interpretations of Plato’s dialogues, as well as recent literary criticisms of Socratic studies all fail to undermine the research programme. We conclude with some thoughts about how and why Socratic studies has proved itself a valuable and fruitful research programme.

Studies in Islamic Legal Theory

This volume is unique as a collection of studies devoted entirely to topics and issues in the field of Islamic legal theory and authored by fourteen scholars known for their work in this field. The studies deal with such topics as early notions of charismatic authority, hermeneutic techniques in Shafi'i's Risalah, uses of the term sunnah in the ninth century A.H., evidence for the emergence of usul al-fiqh as a genre of legal literature in the ninth century, the function of usul al-fiqh in relation to legal practice, theological ramifications of issues in usul al-fiqh, Shi'i attitudes to qiyas, the structure of juristic authority within the madhhab, usul al-fiqh as an instrument of reform, the place of qawa'id within Islamic legal theory. These studies are followed by a discussion among the authors.

Specular Moment: Moment for Reflection

Freud continues to polarize sciences and humanities into two antagonistic cultures. Scientists critical of Freudian literary theorists accuse them of failing to apply truth-criteria; Freudian literary theorists find scientists' 'true or false' analysis simplistic. The scientists assert the arbitrariness of Freud's notions and the lack of hard evidence for them. The theorists argue that Freud investigates myth-making, not biology, and find his hermeneutic techniques highly relevant to the myth-making that is literature. Anyone unpersuaded by this defence risks rejecting a large body of interpretation, including a great deal of recent work on Goethe. A weighty example of recent Freudian criticism is David E. Wellbery's The Specular Moment. Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. Wellbery uses semiotics, structuralism and discourse analysis as well as psychoanalytic concepts to present Goethe as the initiator of a modem lyric which 'draws on the matrix of specularity' (181), that is, for Wellbery, the subject's relation to the mother. In fact, The Specular Moment

A Phenomenological Analysis of the Anointing among Religious Serpent Handlers

Holiness-Pentecostal sects that practice serpent handling do so out of compliance with a literal interpretation of Mark 16:17-18. To investigate the meaning of this practice from within its religious context, phenomenological interviews were conducted with 8 men and 3 women who focused on specific experiences of taking up serpents. Participants reported that serpents were taken up either by faith or by the anointing, but most often by the anointing. From transcripts of these interviews, descriptions of the anointing were presented to an interpretive research group for thematic analysis using hermeneutic techniques. This analysis revealed that the anointing was described as an embodied experience involving an awareness of five themes: (a) "God moving on me," (b) a feeling of empowerment, (c) "indescribable" good feelings, (c) a sense of feeling "not there" in the immediate context, and (d) a "contagious flow." Relationships among these themes and the existential grounds of body, time, others, and world are discussed, as well as the significance of this type of study for other methodological investigations of the anointing experienced by members of Holiness-Pentecostal sects.

The Finale of Mahler's Seventh Symphony: A Deconstructive Reading

The last decade has witnessed the opening of a gap within music theory between two distinct modes of inquiry.* These may be loosely identified as 'Analysis' and 'Criticism'. Criticism, by employing hermeneutic techniques derived from poststructuralism and cultural studies, contests the so-called 'formalism' of Analysis. The 'formalist' approach is taken to treat the musical work as a 'self-contained', 'trans-cultural' or 'trans-historical' entity. For the hermeneuticist, on the other hand, the musical work is understood as a discursive moment in a wider social and political field. It is determined only in relation to a heterogeneous and much contested cultural arena. Any analysis that configures its object of study as autonomous, or its findings as internally unified, is thus an ideological fiction predicated on the notion that knowledge is objective, impartial and detached. In a hermeneutic reading, the formalistic music-analytic endeavour is necessarily interested, partial and ideologically implicated. What follows is an attempt to show that this distinction between Criticism and Analysis is not strictly valid, since the very category 'formalism', against the background of which hermeneutics defines its enterprise, is problematic. The article is divided into two sections. In the first I sketch certain strategic ideas raised by anti-formalist scholarship. It will be suggested that, by insisting on dichotomies that cohere around a distinction between 'object' and 'interpretation', hermeneutics replicates the very formalism it attempts to elude. Broadly speaking, both approaches subscribe to an originary moment which becomes the very measure of the efficacy of the analytic method in question. That is, the musical work itself is the principal site that arbitrates the success or failure of the analytic findings. Despite the postmodernist stance of some hermeneuticallyoriented critics, few of these writers make any explicit reference to the

The Abject: Kristeva and the Antigone

The Abject: Kristeva and the Antigone Clifford Davis Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject provides an illuminating and interrogative hermeneutic technique for Sophocles' Antigone. Kristeva has demonstrated the applicability of this theory to the Theban saga (although, perhaps, with mixed results) in her reading of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrranos and Oedipus at Colonus (Powers of Horror 83-89). Her interpretation of Oedipus Tyrranos not only reinforces Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, but also situates the concept of the abject, as an extension of Lacan, within the ancient text as the agos, defilement of Oedipus. Kristeva argues that the new king, as agos, represents the source of the abject and embodies its purification as pharmakos: scapegoat. The structural and the­ matic oppositions in the Antigone between patriarchal, institutional uniformity in the polis and the more antiquated, chthonic obliga­ tions of the heterogeneous dead mark this drama, too, as extraordi­ narily well-suited for reinterpretation as a confrontation between an archaic, Greek Symbolic and the abject. In this paper, I use Kristevan theory to elucidate and reinterpret the primary opposi­ tions in Sophocles's Antigone and demonstrate how such a reading differs from the structuralist interpretations of C.W. Oudemans and J.P. Vernant. Instead of reducing the antagonism of Antigone and Creon to a Hegelian or structuralist reading of binary opposi­ tion between equally legitimate claims, I demonstrate that the conflicts in the Antigone reflect the psychological tension between nascent patriarchal institutions and the excluded, but sanctified, feminine Other. First, however, it is necessary to present the main tenets of Kristeva's theory of the abject. I. Lacan and Kristeva Julia Kristeva's work is deeply indebted to Jacques Lacan and his reinterpretation of Freudian principles in terms of post-struc­ turalist discourse theory (Lacan, Ecrits; Television). Lacan's theory of the symbolic order (or Symbolic) describes the indoctrination of the child into the phallocentric system of cultural institutions. The Symbolic is a monolithic, unitary system that pervades language and, therefore, all cultural institutions because they are conceived

Hermeneutics in expert systems

Hermeneutics belongs to a sphere of sciences that were traditionally developed within a framework of theology; its origin dates back to the second century BC. Techniques and methods developed by hermeneutics stem from an attempt to reconstruct the correct interpretation of a text through structural analysis of the text itself. The techniques of hermeneutics have important applications today in expert systems. This paper considers hermeneutics under the original meaning of the word.

L'annonce des fleuves d'eau vive en Jean 7, 37-39 (Première partie)

The various proposals of punctuation in Jn 7, 37b-38 all have their weaknesses. More specifically the one which makes of ho pisteuôn eis eme (v. 38a) the subject of pinetô (v. 37b) does not escape criticism. Nevertheless, as the first part of this study shows, the main objections against this punctuation disappear if one takes into consideration a use of semitic syntax (equally present in Jn 7, 52) which leads to interpret the imperative from pinetô, not as an invitation to "drink", but as a promise concerning the effect of a behaviour in faith : "and he will drink, he who believes in me !". The second part of this study attempt to understand the passage of Scripture to which Jn 7, 38 refers. A double component is admitted. On the one hand there is a basic text : "Rivers will flow from his side" ; it refers to Ex 17,6 : "and water will flow from it". But in accordance with a jewish hermeneutical technique, the statement has been enriched by drawing from parallel passages. On the other hand a complementary note is added : "(Rivers ...) of living water" ; it may be taken from Za 14, 8 ; more safely one can say it is inspired from a paradisiac tradition.

Midrash and Indeterminacy

Literary theory, newly conscious of its own historicism, has recently turned its attention to the history of interpretation. For midrash, this attention has arrived none too soon. The activity of Biblical interpretation as practiced by the sages of early Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, midrash has long been known to Western scholars, but mainly as either an exegetical curiosity or a source to be mined for facts about the Jewish background of early Christianity. The perspective of literary theory has placed midrash in a decidedly new light. The very nature of midrash (as recorded in the Talmud as well as in the more typical midrashic collections) has now come to epitomize precisely that order of literary discourse to which much critical writing has recently aspired, a discourse that avoids the dichotomized opposition of literature versus commentary and instead resides in the dense shuttle space between text and interpreter. In the hermeneutical techniques of midrash, critics have found especially attractive the sense of interpretation as play rather than as explication, the use of commentary as a means of extending a text's meanings rather than as a mere forum for the arbitration of original authorial intention. Some theoreticians have gone so far as to invoke midrash as a precursor, in a spiritual if not a historical sense, to more recent post-structuralist literary theory, in particular to deconstruction with its critique of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence. For students of midrash, the connection with literary theory has been both productive and troublesome. On the beneficial side, the new perspective has virtually revolutionized the traditional study of midrash,

Infant and family development: from triads to tetrads.

This research involves an interactional analysis of the family system as it changes with the arrival and development of a second child. In a longitudinal-observational study 16 families expecting their second child at the beginning of the study were observed over a period of 2 years in their homes. Observations consisted of a total of 26–28 videotapes (30–60 min each) per family. In addition, parental interviews dealing with biographical and child-rearing information were conducted. Data analysis involved the use of hermeneutic techniques with an emphasis on data fit and wholistic interpretation rather than early data quantification. Using such an approach, general patterns of changes in family interaction coinciding with developmental changes in the second child were delineated. The major result described here is the articulation of a three-phase process through which families progress as they change from a triadic to a tetradic system. These phases are seen to result from the interaction of structural features within the family and developmental changes in the second child.