Hermeneutical Issues Research Articles

DISCOURSE “PHILOSOPHY OF FINANCIAL ANALYSIS” IN THE STRUCTURE OF ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE

Introduction. Global challenges and a dynamic understanding of our changing world form a new paradigm, the foundation of which is in fundamental research and practical applications of scientific intelligence, which allows obtaining significant results and finding solutions to global and local problems. One of the forms of multidisciplinarity is the convergence and development of scientific knowledge – philosophy and economic sciences, including financial analysis. The peculiarities of the formation and development of financial analysis as an independent science require the study of its philosophical foundations. The purpose of the article is to study the theoretical aspects of the philosophy of financial analysis and its place in the structure of economic knowledge in order to solve the hermeneutic issues of creating an effective model of financial analysis as a holistic science. Results. It is outlined that the philosophy of the economic world determines general, universal trends and patterns of its development based on philosophical categories: goals, explanations, theories, verification, induction and demarcation. The expansion of the subject field of the philosophy of economics made it possible to single out the philosophy of financial analysis. It has been proven that the existence of financial analysis as a separate, independent, holistic science is a reason to investigate its philosophical foundations, and the discourse “philosophy of financial analysis” covers philosophical questions of the “nature” and structure of scientific explanation, justification of the scientific method, changes in scientific theory, the status of scientific laws, the discussion between scientific-realist and anti-realist approaches and occupies considerable importance in the system of economic sciences. Conclusions. Therefore, the formation of the philosophical foundations of the scientific economic system, the provision of reliable and substantive knowledge about financial analysis, substantiated in a thorough (comprehensive) logical theoretical form, is the need of today. After all, the philosophy of financial analysis studies philosophical questions of the “nature” and structure of scientific explanation, the justification of methods, changes in scientific theory, the status of scientific laws, and the debate between scientific-realist and anti-realist approaches. The understanding of the philosophy of financial analysis as a discipline is revealed through the interrelated components, philosophical dimensions of financial analysis: ontological, epistemological, epistemological, axiological, methodological, which influence and determine the research paradigm and will be the subject of further scientific investigations, as they form the philosophical doctrine of financial and economic reality.

Hermeneutic Modalities in the Exegesis and Theology of Petr Pokorný

Petr Pokorný (1933-2020) was a long-time professor of New Testament at the Evangelical Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague. He authored a number of books and studies in which he dealt directly and indirectly with hermeneutical issues important for the proper understanding and reliable interpretation of the biblical text. In 2005, in collaboration with 12 other authors, he published a kind of hermeneutical compendium, or rather a modality of the hermeneutical approach to Scripture, entitled Hermeneutics as a Theory of Understanding from Basic Questions of Language to the Interpretation of the Bible (508 pages). Part of Pokorný's Hermeneutics (pp. 17-215) was published in 2011 in the English translation Hermeneutics as a Theory of Understanding. Pokorný did not intend to present the traditional history of hermeneutics or to create a foundational theoretical work. As he notes, he was initially inspired by Paul Ricoeur and his hermeneutical practice, but developed his own stance based on his own understanding of the problems of interpreting Scripture and his critical reflections. He admits that he does not address some of the issues of hermeneutics and that there are several ways to process the material of hermeneutics. Therefore, his work can be considered as hermeneutic modalities rather than a finished compact hermeneutic work. Nevertheless, in Professor Pokorný we can read a lot of useful and rich material from different areas of hermeneutics, such as: Language as a coding system, symbol and metaphor, text between tradition and future, reader and text, genre, various methods of interpretation, strangeness and attractiveness of texts, history and revelation, revelation and testimony, etc. Based on this hermeneutical set and other exegetical works, the reviewer attempts to highlight these modalities and provide a definable picture of Pokorný hermeneutical approaches and procedures.

Defending ‘Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazālī and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm': Abrahamic Dialogues and Interdisciplinary Insights

ABSTRACT In this article, I respond to my interlocutors, who have raised various points while engaging my book, Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazālī and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm. In addressing their arguments and points of engagement, I have ordered this article into four parts: (1) methodological issues, (2) scientific issues, (3) metaphysical issues, and (4) hermeneutic issues.

A Smothering Embrace? Hermeneutical Issues in Catholic Discourse about Jews and Judaism

AbstractThis article examines how Jews and Judaism are envisioned in the Catholic imagination, through a critical reading of contemporary Catholic discourse on Judaism. It identifies three problematic areas. The first concerns the tendency of Catholic discourse to project a specifically Christian vision of salvation history onto the Jewish people, which reflects Christian rather than Jewish self-understanding. Second, this article analyzes patterns in language and imagery in Vatican documents about Judaism, alert to troubling allusions implicit in the texts. The third area concerns a hermeneutical obstacle to deep interreligious understanding, one which may be ultimately insurmountable: namely, the challenges of understanding the religious other according to its own self-understanding. This article reaches an ambivalent conclusion, conceding that the goal of recognizing the self-understanding of another religious tradition may ultimately be impossible.

Emblematics and metaphor: theoretical facets and hermeneutic issues

The article focuses on Renaissance emblematics and its privileged relationship with metaphor, considered in the light of contemporary theories as an inherently tensional form, steeped in interchange and transition and heavily relying on a basically conflictual dynamic. Though often dismissed as an academic, antiquarian form of figurality or as a pleasing symbolical form steeped in monologic stability, emblematics was in fact conceived as a brand-new hybrid textual mode whose complex interplay of signs favored multiplied discursive models and the constant relay between visual and textual elements, between abstract conceptualization and thoughts-made-visible. The paper, in other words, will try to reassess and re-evaluate emblematics as a profoundly plural form of communication whose connections with metaphor were much deeper and qualitatively different than it is usually thought. This slant approach to what is conventionally considered a tame example of early modern textuality highlights, on the contrary, its idiosyncratic meaning procedures: the metaphorical conceptualizations of emblematic compositions were not necessarily based on similarity and testify to their cognitive potential which ushered in an idea of communication as projective and dislocating, as a dialogic space allowing for the paradoxical copresence of ideological consistency and its deconstruction.

Liberty, political economy and good government in Adam Smith

What does Adam Smith mean by “good government”? How is it related to his political economy and system of natural liberty? No extensive or specific treatment of these hermeneutical issues has been given in Smith’s scholarship. Answering these questions is fundamental to having a new interpretation of the various links between the legal, political, ethical and economic aspects of Smith’s view of social order. The great theme of good government, which runs through the whole history of Western political-legal thought, if read in relation to the system of natural liberty, provides a different understanding of the thought of Smith on “Political Economy” as the “science of a statesman or legislator” and the new art of good government. Our reconstruction of Smith’s view of good government aims to cast light on and give a new significance to his unfinished project of a new science of society.

First Words, Last Words: New Theories for Reading Old Texts in Sixteenth-Century India. By Yigal Bronner and Lawrence McCrea

In First Words, Last Words, Yigal Bronner and Lawrence McCrea expand on the trending topic of intellectual life in early modern India by discussing in detail the scholastic debate on scriptural interpretation and the role of sequence between the sixteenth-century Dualists, defended by Vyāsatīrtha and Vijayīndratīrtha, and the Nondualists, represented by Appayya Dīkṣita. They present this complex topic with a finesse that will please scholars seasoned in the algebraic complexities of hermeneutics across religious traditions, and with a fluency that can excite academics interested in the intellectual innovativeness of historical South Asia. Their approach focuses on the quest for newness in early modern Indian scholarship which continues to be described as traditionalist even in recent studies that seek to challenge such view (e.g. Pollock 1985, 2001 and Ganeri 2011, 2008; pp. 6–11). By discussing also parallel hermeneutic issues of sequence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they show that social and institutional traditionalising forces were at play in religious traditions across the globe. This contextualisation takes Indic philology out of its too often isolated place. Nevertheless, the discussion from India on its own can fascinate a range of scholars.

Everyday life as a basis for understanding socio-cultural meanings: hermeneutical aspect

The article reveals some aspects of the specificity of understanding and formation of meaning in the social sphere. The study of social objectivity, effective communication and interaction with the Others, is a key issue of social hermeneutics, focused on the person in his daily personal and social activities. The analysis of the research of a number of representatives of different sociological directions showed that when they are own specificity, they are conceptually connected and solve one set of problems. It necessarily includes an individual and social subject, communicative, linguistic and extralinguistic aspects, the participation of experience and memory, knowing and taking into account the contexts that create a domain of intersubjective meanings. Everyday life as an area of everyday knowledge and the world, in which a person (inter)acts, is the basis for understanding and organizing socio-cultural meanings, both at the individual and social levels.

Joseph Smith's Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism

Joseph Smith's Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism

Artemidorus, Dream Exegesis, and the Case of the Interpolating Expert Dreamer

Abstract This article makes the following case: according to Artemidorus of Daldis’ Oneirocriticon one main task of the dream interpreter is to identify, through knowledge of the dreamer, which components of a dream are internal in order to assess—as far as possible—the external components of a dream. I argue that very similar hermeneutic issues were being extensively theorised in Artemidorus’ period by Jewish and Christian writers who were concerned with the problem of prophetic interpolation: in particular, cases in the Bible in which prophecies do not come true. In making this comparison, I hope to clarify a number of features of Artemidorus’ hermeneutic, including the relationship between the origin and structure of dreams and the exegetical practice of the dream-interpreter.

Studying Digital Pentecostalism

Abstract One of the most important developments in recent history has been the invention of the internet and this has led to many academic disciplines developing digital research competence. However, there has been limited practical-theological research completed in the area of digitally mediated Pentecostalism. Therefore, this article addresses this important area, as conceived within the discipline of practical theology using empirical research methods. Even before the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Pentecostals had embraced an online delivery of worship and ministry. Nevertheless, the capacity for the digital mediation of beliefs and practices has developed considerably in 2020 and 2021, and these recent developments invite further critical attention. To develop competence in the study of digital Pentecostalism, practical theologians will be required to acquire competence in “virtual ethnography,” sometimes referred to as “netnography,” that is, the academic study of online communities, including online churches. As part of this competence, there is a need to reframe virtual ethnography within an empirical-theological approach as a subset of practical theology, and this includes attending to hermeneutical issues as well as technical competence (that is, methods of gathering and evaluating online data). In this article, I shall explore some of these methodological concerns and suggest ways in which scholars can develop approaches to the research of digital pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.

Digital 3D and the Hermeneutics of Modernity

Digital 3D and the Hermeneutics of Modernity Chang-Min Yu (bio) Nick Jones. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 304 pages. $140 hardback. $35 paperback. About twenty years ago, David Bordwell proposed the "modernity thesis" to characterize an emerging trend of scholarship that drew upon the works of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.1 In this "culturalist" school of thought—originating from New York and then prospering at Chicago—cinema originates from and, more importantly, reflects modernity.2 The first claim is widely accepted; the second is, to say the least, fraught and contested. While most scholars can agree that cinema is a modern technologized art, it is difficult to establish a causal relationship between what is onscreen—fast editing, intensified momentum, kaleidoscopic spectacle, you name it—and what circulates in culture. The reason is simple: if whatever case of modernity is that dominating, why are we not seeing its manifestation everywhere rather than in only a few selected tokens of its forestalled realization? Isomorphic reflection aside, it also seems strenuous to clarify modernity's history since the nineteenth century—its rise, fall, upsurge, and submergence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—with regard to any particular screen technique or characteristic at stake. Though largely left [End Page 386] as an unstated assumption, this issue of modernity hermeneutics is the daunting task Nick Jones sets for himself in Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: to convincingly articulate the modernity of 3D cinema and the relation to its cultural counterpart, "digital 3D."3 The book begins with a long history of 3D cinema and its attendant research (chapter 1) and subsequently moves into a broader historiographical framework stretching to include the Renaissance perspective (chapter 2). For Jones, 3D cinema and media have not supplanted art historian Erwin Panofsky's perspective as humanity's symbolic form, but they do "encapsulate many of the dominant and emerging logics that structure media, technology, and spatial knowledge at the present digital moment" (60). This is Jones's (weak) modernity thesis. For Jones, 3D cinema (re)surfaces because it "engender[s], document[s], and highlight[s] this situation" that is built upon the contemporary rendition of the "stereoscopic imaginary" (3). And I want to highlight "digital 3D" as a term because it is a modifier nominalized. It is untethered from "filmmaking" (1) and becomes a free-floating, abstract, expansive noun—like the so-called "stereoscopic imaginary"—a paragraph after. That supple abstraction is subsequently deployed to encapsulate all the chapter key words that Jones discusses: simulation, immersion, surveillance (chapters 3–5) and defamiliarization, distortion, and intimacy (chapters 6–8), the first three spatialized governance practices and the rest haptic subversive tactics. One is the smoothly engrossing commercial cinema that thematizes the datafied exploitation of the planet. The other reveals the operating logic of such calculations by either the slight instability inherent in stereoscopy, transitional failures in digital filmmaking, or auteurist interventions within the sphere of art cinema. The dichotomy is totalizing infrastructure versus localized resistance, abstraction and embodiment ontologically imbricated with each other in this calculated and yet tantalizing tactility. Thus understood, the term "digital 3D" has two purposes. The first is to draw a line—"the malleability of digital images detaches them from the connection to the past that seemed to define analog media" (53)—between analog and computerized 3D visuality. The distinction reaffirms the already-aged newness of stereoscopic images, whose history the book meticulously traces through existent scholarship. The second is to rearticulate 3D films, such as Avatar (2009) and Goodbye to Language (2014), in terms of culture at large. "Visual culture" in the book's subtitle is enlisted to spice up and make expansive the subject, which is to say that 3D is significant because it is cultural (and less cinematic). Hence the abstraction, [End Page 387] because the nominalized term enables a shift from "3D cinema" to "3D culture." This expansion produces a curious effect. The films discussed do not have to be 3D films as long as they furnish a holographic presentation in a technologically mediated environment. Similarly, Jones can point to virtual reality and other embodied visual praxis as part...

Metamorfosi queer

The desire as the presence of a lack. The heterosexual symbolic apparatus as a hierarchical paradigm. The body materiality as a space of unexpected meanings. The performatization of the genre. The hermeneutic issues in the shows of the ricci / forte ensemble are numerous: the bodies have a destabilizing, excessive ostension, torn by normative ghosts and violent political speeches. In this study we intend to highlight in the theater of ricci / forte the presence of identity constriction processes of contemporary society, told by performers similar to liminary creatures, far from regulatory paradigms and the imposition of modeling. The study investigates how ricci / forte – with an attack on the symbolic and the imaginary – deny the founding roles and cultural archetypes of the West. Their original post-dramatic iconoclasm fights the male / female polarization, the dominant patriarchal social structure, seeking the truth about the construction of the subject’s desire.

Anti-Climacus and the Demoralization of Sin

AbstractThe paper develops the claim that in The Sickness unto Death (1849), Kierkegaard conceptualizes a demoralized understanding of sin. Rather than interpreting sin as moral guilt, he proposes a concept of sin that takes the form of alienation. The claim is unfolded in a three-step argumentation: First, we identify crucial hermeneutical issues and stress the role of the pseudonyms within Kierkegaard’s writings. Second, we offer a detailed analysis of the theory of self-consciousness developed by Anti-Climacus. Finally, using the romantic interpretation of Kierkegaard as a foundation, we demonstrate how Anti-Climacus conceptualizes sin as alienation

Puzzle and politics of historical reconstruction

This essay focuses on the topic of the emergence of Christianity and Judaism as related but distinct religious traditions, as an example of a process of religious and cultural change, which has had an enormous impact on Western and other societies around the world. At the heart of this question lies what appear to be contradictions between normative practices in antiquity and those we know of today, leading us to consider the historical and hermeneutical issue of continuity and change over time; its how, when and why. Rejecting the idea that theological differences between Judaism and Christianity necessitated a ‘parting of ways’ between them, it is argued that social, political and colonial decision-making was essential to this process, and that, furthermore, a historical focus on institutional realities in the ancient Mediterranean world, including in Jewish society, will challenge many long-held assumptions about the origins not only of Christianity but also of Judaism. The general historical reconstruction offered is then applied to a specific archaeological site, Capernaum, showing how traces of the larger pattern of development from the first to the fifth century CE may be seen in the histories of two buildings in this town.

EVOLVING CREATION: AN ISMAILI MUSLIM INTERPRETATION OF EVOLUTION

AbstractThis article presents a constructive Shīʿī Ismaili Muslim engagement with Neo‐Darwinian evolution. By drawing on Ismaili metaphysics and hermeneutics, I argue that Ismailis can affirm evolution without exceptions due to four features of contemporary and historical Ismaili thought. First, Aga Khan III (d. 1957), the 48th hereditary Ismaili Imam, integrated Neo‐Darwinian evolution with his theological views. Likewise, the present Imam Aga Khan IV (b. 1936) teaches that there is no conflict between Islam and scientific truth because God's creative act is eternal and continuous. Second, Ismaili Neoplatonic metaphysics is compatible with evolution because it situates all natural processes as guided by the Universal Soul without a need for miracles. Third, the common descent of all life lends further support to the Ismaili belief in an unbroken lineage of hereditary Imams since the origins of life on earth. Fourth, the Quranic story of Adam's creation poses no hermeneutical issue because Ismaili scholars read the Adam story symbolically through esoteric exegesis (ta'wīl).

Hermeneutyka Hansa-Georga Gadamera – rehabilitacja ideału retoryki jako sztuki dobrego mówienia

The article presents Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics as an attempt to return to the classical ideal of the art of good speaking, in which the purpose of speech is seen as an intertwining of truth and goodness. Rhetoric understood in this way opposes its sophistic antithesis, which is directed at defending the speaker’s individual ratios and interests, ‘truth’ constructing, manipulating the audience’s beliefs and seductive qualities of style. The text analyzes selected issues of hermeneutics – truth taken as aletheia, the hermeneutic circle and language, relating them to the classical stages of speech preparation – inventio, dispositio and elocutio. In this way, rhetoric and hermeneutics will be shown as disciplines founded on ethics.

Audiodescription des arts plastiques. Autoportrait de Dora Maar

The article addresses the problem of intersemiotic translation: translating images into words. The first part deals with the issue of image hermeneutics. Following this, eye tracking research is briefly described and museum audio description for the blind and visually impaired is introduced. A case study of Self-portrait of Dora Maar is carried out, highlighting the importance of sight in the artist’s work. The text tries to answer the following questions: Who and using which techniques and strategies should translate images into words for recipients with visual disabilities, so that the translation is satisfactory and adapted to their perception? How to provide a visually impaired person with an aesthetic experience without imposing our own perception of the image on them?

The Bible & Ancient Science: Principles of Interpretation

The Bible & Ancient Science: Principles of Interpretation

Exploring Christian Literature in the Contemporary and Secular University

Abstract: Both of us teach in the Duke English Department and hold secondary appointments in the Duke Divinity School. In this essay, we reflect on impediments to teaching Christian literature in contemporary English departments, in particular the naturalistic, anti-metaphysical dogma pervading humanistic inquiry, yet also the widespread theological illiteracy among today’s undergraduates and graduates. Still, students usually embrace focused ethical and theological inquiry, as well as the attention to textual and hermeneutic issues called for by much Christian literature across the centuries. We conclude by outlining options for a more productive future alignment of literary and theological inquiry and pedagogy.