Hermeneutic Turn Research Articles

The Hermeneutical Turn in American Critical Theory, 1830-1860

The Hermeneutical Turn in American Critical Theory, 1830–1860 M. D. Walhout Long considered an obscure province of biblical studies, hermeneutics is now familiar territory to American literary critics, along with phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and the other European theories that have redrawn the map of American criticism in the past twenty-five years. The gradual transformation of hermeneutics into a theory of criticism, and ultimately into a comprehensive theory of the human sciences, was the work of a series of great German thinkers, including Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. These figures were introduced (or reintroduced) to American critics by E. D. Hirsch, whose Validity in Interpretation (1967) “shattered,” in the words of Richard E. Palmer, “the splendid isolation of American literary criticism from hermeneutics.” Hailing Schleiermacher and Dilthey as the forefathers of “objective interpretation,” Hirsch dismissed Heidegger and Gadamer as prophets of subjectivism. For his part, Palmer strove to vindicate Heidegger and Gadamer as the true heirs of the hermeneutical tradition. Noting the difference between Hirsch’s understanding of hermeneutics and theirs, Palmer concluded, So the hermeneutical debate goes on. On the one side are the defenders of objectivity and validation, who look to hermeneutics as the theoretical source for norms of validation; on the other side are the phenomenologists of the event of understanding, who stress the historical character of this “event,” and consequently the limitations of all claims to “objective knowledge” and “validity.” 1 Twenty-five years later this hermeneutical debate is still going on. [End Page 683] What Hirsch and Palmer did not realize is that they were reviving a debate over the nature of interpretation that dated from the late nineteenth century, when American literary criticism was undergoing professionalization. 2 As early as 1885, in the programmatic introduction to his book on Shakespeare as a dramatic artist, Richard G. Moulton had declared, “In the treatment of literature the proposition which seems to stand most in need of assertion at the present moment is, that there is an inductive science of literary criticism.” Moulton proceeded to lay down “a foundation axiom of inductive literary criticism: Interpretation in literature is of the nature of a scientific hypothesis, the truth of which is tested by the degree of completeness with which it explains the details of the literary work as they actually stand.” 3 Thirty years later Moulton repeated this axiom, insisting that “such inductive treatment constitutes the very alphabet of science.” 4 But Moulton’s determination to apply the logic of the natural sciences to the interpretation of literature was not without its critics. In 1900 the German-born philologist Julius Goebel began a valiant, if futile, effort to introduce the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey to his American colleagues. 5 Years later, in an article published in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Goebel drew on Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik und Kritik (1838) to show “the possibility of attaining exact knowledge in the mental sciences without the aid of the scientific or laboratory methods.” 6 Later still, in an article on Dilthey published in the same journal, Goebel recalled how he had argued in an address to the Modern Language Association that criticism “had lost touch with the contemporary movements emphasizing the independence and importance of the mental sciences. What seemed to me needed above all was a reform of the method of interpretation for which Dilthey had set the example both in principle and practice.” 7 It was not until the late 1960s that Goebel’s project was finally revived. While Goebel may have been the first American literary scholar to use the word “hermeneutics,” the concept of interpretation had long been a part of American critical theory. In fact, what might be called the “hermeneutical turn” in American critical theory occurred well before the era of professionalization. [End Page 684] In order to trace this turn, we must recover the work of the amateur critical theorists of the antebellum era, including such forgotten figures as George Allen and Edwin Percy Whipple. Disciples of the Schlegels and Coleridge, these amateur theorists established the basic premises of the hermeneutical turn: that criticism is a science; that the critic must “reproduce” the author’s creative process; that...

The Hermeneutical Turn in American Critical Theory, 1830-1860

The Hermeneutical Turn in American Critical Theory, 1830-1860

The Meaning of the Hermeneutic Tradition in Contemporary Philosophy

In his Notes on Philosophy, which he began writing in 1796, Friedrich Schlegel asserts that ‘The fact that one person understands the other is philosophically incomprehensible, but it is certainly magical.’ In the interim a large amount of philosophical effort has been expended on trying to refute Schlegel's first claim. The fact is, though, that what Michael Dummett calls a ‘fullblooded theory of meaning’ is now looking less and less like a really feasible philosophical enterprise, so Schlegel may have actually been right. Dummett maintains that a ‘full-blooded theory of meaning’ ‘must give an explicit account, not only of what anyone must know in order to know the meaning of any given expression, but of what constitutes having such knowledge’. However, as I shall try to show via aspects of the hermeneutic tradition, it is precisely this way of talking about meaning and understanding that renders them incomprehensible. The differences between approaching the issue of understanding from the hermeneutic tradition and approaching it from the analytical tradition can, I want to suggest, tell us something important about the state of philosophy today. My aim is eventually to suggest that we need to understand the analytical version of the ‘linguistic turn’ in modern philosophy as a perhaps rather questionable aspect of a much more important ‘hermeneutic turn’, whose implications are now becoming apparent in more and more diverse areas of contemporary philosophy.

The Illusion of Theory: Discussion of R.D. Chessick's “Poststructural Psychoanalysis or Wild Analysis?”

The Illusion of Theory: Discussion of R.D. Chessick's “Poststructural Psychoanalysis or Wild Analysis?”Michelle PriceMichelle PriceDirector, Treatment Center for Incest and Abuse, Karen Homey Clinic; Faculty and Supervisor, American Institute for Psychoanalysis; Faculty, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.110 East 87th Street #1C, New York, NY 10028Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:July 2017https://doi.org/10.1521/jaap.1.1995.23.1.63PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutReferencesBruner J. (1993), Loyal opposition and the clarity of dissent, commentary on Donald P. Spence's “The hermeneutic turn.” Psychoanal. Dialogues, 3 (1), 11–19. Crossref, Google ScholarDerrida J. (1981), Positions, (annotated by Bass A., Trans.), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Google ScholarDimen M. (1994), Seminar on psychoanalysis and sexuality. New York. Google ScholarFlax J. (1990), Thinking fragments: Psychoanalysis, feminism and postmodernism in the contemporary west, University of California Press, California Google ScholarFreud S. (1910), Observations on wild psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, Vol. 11, p. 221. Google ScholarGay P. (1988), Freud: A life for our time, W. W. Norton, New York. Google ScholarGeertz C. (1983), Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology, Basic Books, New York. Google ScholarKaminsky M. (May 20, 1994), Discourse and self formation: The concept of mentsch in modern yiddish culture. Paper presented at the Annual meeting of the American Academy for Psychoanalysis, Philadelphia. Google ScholarLyotard J. (1984), The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Google ScholarMitchell S. A. (1993), Hope and dread in psychoanalysis, Basic Books, New York. Google ScholarRivera M. (1989), Linking the psychological and the social: Feminism, poststructuralism and multiple personality, Dissociation, 2 (1), 24–31. Google ScholarSampson E. E. (1993), Identity politics: Challenges to psychology's understanding. Am. Psychol., 48 (12), 1219–1230. Crossref, Google ScholarSaussure F. (1974), A course in general linguistics, Fontana, London. Google ScholarWeedon C. (1987), Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Google ScholarWittgenstein L. (1968), Philosophical investigations, 3 Ed., (Anscombe G.E.M., Trans.), Macmillan, New York. (Original work published 1953) Google Scholar Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 23Issue 1Mar 1995 Information© 1995 The American Academy of PsychoanalysisPDF download

Justice and Interpretation.

Georgia Warnke began her career by studying the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, the foremost contemporary proponent of hermeneutics, a philosophical approach that centers on interpretation as dialogue across times and cultures. In this book, she traces the myriad ways in which interpretive perspectives have come to prominence in modem political philosophy. Focusing on the work of John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Ronald Dworkin, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Jurgen Habermas, Warnke finds an increasing concern with the grounding of political norms in communal values rather than on abstract, universal principles.Warnke develops the implications of this hermeneutic turn in political philosophy, identifying and defining a range of unresolved problems and suggesting a new model of democracy that takes free and equal discussion and mutual education as its primary values.Georgia Warnke is Professor of Philosophy, University of California at Riverside.

Loyal opposition and the clarity of dissent commentary on Donald P. Spence's “the hermeneutic turn”

Loyal opposition and the clarity of dissent commentary on Donald P. Spence's “the hermeneutic turn”

Centers of moral gravity commentary on Donald Spence's “the hermeneutic turn”;

Centers of moral gravity commentary on Donald Spence's “the hermeneutic turn”;

The hermeneutic turn soft science or loyal opposition?

The hermeneutic turn in psychoanalysis may be less a move toward soft science than an attempt to address certain failures in the classical tradition. The latter has failed to convert Freud's many metaphors into anything like responsible science; it has been unable to give up its fascination with Freud and move on to other thinkers and other points of view; it has been unable to find an answer to the problem of secrecy and privileged access to clinical data; under the heavy hand of theory, it has all but eliminated research from the psychoanalytic enterprise; and finally, it has been unable to find a home for the Roshomon effect and the fact that almost everything worth looking at has at least two sides. Above all, psychoanalysis needs to recognize that our theory is often the projection of either our Zeitgeist or our personal history. Until we can make room for the problem of subjectivity in our theory‐building, we will never be able to separate the singer from the song.

?The Hermeneutic turn? in Husserl's phenomenology of language

?The Hermeneutic turn? in Husserl's phenomenology of language

Epistemology As Hermeneutics

Recent discussion has seen an increase in the interest in hermeneutics. The increased interest in hermeneutics goes back at least until the ap pearance of Being and Time in 1927, more than sixty years ago. This book is characterized by the unresolved tension between two clearly incompatible theses: the Husserlian form of absolute truth, and a post-Husserlian view of truth arising from the hermeneutical circle. More recently, the interest in hermeneutics has been strengthened by the appearance of Truth and Method in 1960, in which Gadamer, Heidegger's most important student, developed the hermeneutical thesis of the latter's Fundamentalontologie in a way which has influenced numerous other thinkers, notably Ricoeur and Habermas, in a wide-ranging and often confused discussion. The latter's theory of communicative action can be seen as carrying further the Gadamerian view that knowledge results from interpretation. In Habermas's version of the linguistic turn, which is further influenced by Kant's view of Vernunftinteresse and Habermas's own, peculiar reading of Peirce, speech is intrinsically aimed at potential agreement through the development of consensus. The aim of the present paper is to contribute to an understanding of the relationship between epistemology and hermeneutics. The partisans of hermeneutics, specifically including Gadamer, often present it as a new, un precedented approach, even as a way to overcome the problem of epistemology. Like the early Heidegger's claims to recover the supposedly authentic problem of metaphysics, so as a result of his hermeneutical turn Gadamer claims to overcome the problem of knowledge through phenomenological research. But the irony is clear if we recall that a main theme in Gadamer's thought lies in the renewed attention to tradition as a source of knowledge, in marked contrast to Heidegger, upon whose concep tion of hermeneutics he is strongly dependent. Now the novelty of the hermeneutic approach obviously does not lie merely in a concern with preceding forms of thought. Indeed, philosophy, even in the positions of those who refuse the tradition, has always been traditional since the discus sion, at least in the West, can only take place against the Platonic

Hermeneutik als Heilmittel?

Abstract Social scientists usually presuppose that individual behaviour is meaningful and understandable. At the same time they aim at nomological explanations. This is criticized by some economists who recommend a hermeneutical turn to overcome the crisis in economic and sociological thinking. The author tries to show that it is counterproductive to turn to hermeneutics to solve social science problems, and that it is misleading to use Max Weber in support of this claim, because Weber's ideas are incompatible with hermeneutics a la Heidegger.

Beyond the objectivist and the subjectivist: Learning to read accounting as text

Accounting research, especially that focused on understanding accounting inits organizational context, is increasingly recognizing the “subjective” as a realm of interest distinct from the “objective” realm that previously had been its predominant concern. This paper argues that although it is a step forward for accounting research to recognize both the “subjective” and the “objective” as valid concerns, it is a mistake to pose a dichotomy between the two or to suggest that there are two different kinds of researchers (objectivist and subjectivist) who appropriately focus on one realm of experience or another. The hermeneutic turn which is taking place in the broader social sciences and which is reflected in the appearance of subjectivist accounting research, is properly understood as a rejection of the subjective-objective dichotomy. The hermeneutic turn appreciates that our knowledge of accounting and organizations is not guaranteed by a method that separates the objective from the subjective in order to penetrate to the “laws” of the social universe. Instead, our knowledge of accounting and organizations is constructed through a social practice in which such distinctions are not meaningful. Morgan's recent book, Images of Organization (Morgan, 1986), goes beyond the false dichotomy between the subjectivist and the objectivist and present eight image-based readings of organization. In this paper I give a reading of his text that relates it to the hermeneutic turn in the social sciences and explores its implications for understanding accounting in its organizational context as well as for doing accounting research.

Psychoanalysis and the hermeneutic turn: a critique of Narrative Truth and Historical Truth.

Through a discussion of Donald Spence's Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, a critical introduction to the hermeneutic or interpretive perspective is presented. Spence's book has generally been assumed to offer a hermeneutic reformulation of psychoanalysis. However, its presuppositions are incompatible with fundamental tenets of contemporary hermeneutic thought, as expressed in the philosophies of Heidegger, Gadamer, and the later Wittgenstein. Spence's basic assumptions are classically empiricist and positivistic. His vision of human experience is essentially associationistic and Humean; it treats experience as involving two processes, the passive reception of raw sense data and a subsequent projection of meaningful interpretation. Spence advocates the gathering of brute data while denying or downplaying the epistemological value of theorizing and of interpretive understandings. These assumptions are contrasted with those of the hemeneutic philosophers. Unlike these philosophers, Spence tends to dichotomize coherence and correspondence theories of truth. As a result, he wavers between relativism (regarding therapeutic interpretations) and objectivism (regarding scientific knowledge).

Theology and the Hermeneutical Turn

Theology and the Hermeneutical Turn

Exploring Clinical Methods for Social Research.

Introduction - Kenwyn K Smith and David N Berg PART ONE: CLINICAL ISSUES The Clinical Demands of Research Methods - David N Berg and Kenwyn K Smith Taking Our Selves Seriously as Researchers - Clayton P Alderfer The Hermeneutic Turn and the Single Case Study in Psychoanalysis - Marshall Edelson Commentary PART TWO: CLINICAL UNDERSTANDING Action Usable Knowledge - Cortlandt Cammann Epistemological Problems in Researching Human Relationships - Kenwyn K Smith Looking at Research Ideas as Behavioral Data - Stewart E Perry Feminist Distrust - Shulamit Reinharz Problems of Context and Content in Sociological Work What Is Clinical Method? - Rodney L Lowman Commentary PART THREE: CLINICAL INVOLVEMENT On Seeking One's Own Clinical Voice - J Richard Hackman A Personal Account Anxiety in Research Relationships - David N Berg Self-Full Research - Philip H Mirvis and Meryl Reis Louis Working Through the Self as Instrument in Organizational Research On the Researcher's Group Memberships - Kathy E Kram Virtuous Subjectivity - Alan Peshkin In the Participant-Observer's I's Commentary PART FOUR: CLINICAL METHODS Reconstructing an Organization's History - Valerie M Simmons Systematic Distortion in Retrospective Data History in the Here and Now - Jonathon H Gilette The Development of a Historical Perspective Using Participant-Observation to Construct a Life History - Helen Swick Perry On Studying Emotionally Hot Topics - Robert I Sutton and Susan J Schurman Lessons from an Investigation of Organizational Death Assessing Local Causality in Qualitative Research - A Michael Huberman and Matthew B Miles Commentary

A hermeneutical accent on the conduct of political inquiry

In different ways language occupies a central concern in the development of contemporary philosophy. Hermeneutics flourishes in l i terary criticism and psychoanalysis today, but there is a curious lag in political theory. Despite the natural affinity of the history of political thought and jurisprudential studies to hermeneutics in which the not ion o f interpreta t ion plays a prominent role, they have yet to make a hermeneutical turn. The day will soon come, we hope, when historians of political thought may suddenly realize that, like Jourdain of Moli~re 's play (Le Bourgeois Genn'lhomme), they have been speaking the prose of hermeneutics all their lives or must come to terms with questions posed by it. The aim of this paper is to draw at tent ion to phenomenology as a permanent revolution in thinking and to place the not ion o f tinguisticality at the center o f the conduct of political inquiry. In order to do this, it a t tempts to apply the philosophical insights of hermeneutical phenomenology to the conduct of political inquiry. We shall focus our discussion on Gadamer 's seminal work on hermeneutical phenomenology Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Method, 1960) 1 and its relevance to the conduct o f polit ical inquiry. His hermeneutical view for that mat ter , the phenomenological approach in general that the