Hermeneutic Nature Research Articles

Beobachtungen zu den Voraussetzungen des hypothetisch-deduktiven und des hypothetisch-induktiven Argumentierens im Rahmen einer hermeneutischen Konzeption der Textinterpretation

AbstractThe contribution clarifies from an epistemological and hermeneutical perspective some of the indispensable assumptions which are generally made during hypothetical deductive and hypothetical inductive inferences in text interpretations, but which are rarely reflected as such. The modes of inference of the natural sciences often serve as a model for, e. g., a ›hermeneutics of nature‹, even though these modes of inference cannot be directly compared to those of the humanities (1). In order to understand the conditions for making such a comparison, we consider the problem of interpretation conceived as the problem of the arbitrariness of interpretations. This problem, which has the three components of question, of evaluation, and of knowledge, can be solved by a concept of interpretation in which the arbitrariness is avoided or limited by a methodology of text interpretation (2). Meeting the general demands of a theory/methodology of interpretation requires us to explicitly specify the underlying concepts of meaning and interpretation (3). When interpretation is understood as relating a text to a context, the concept of meaning fixes a primary context for this text-context relation. The concept of interpretation associated to the concept of meaning distinguishes further contexts, possibly in a hierarchical order. Relations between different interpretations can then be analyzed as relations between the concepts of meaning and interpretation. Furthermore, disputes about the sense and relevance of questions can then be understood analytically as well as historically. We illustrate this with the example of the question whether Don Quixote was a Marrano. This will show that even with fixed concepts of meaning and interpretation no a priori criteria for the definitive closure of the interpretation of a work of literature can be given (4). Inferences of interpretation presuppose relations of meaning, by which we understand a relation between the signifier and the signified. For poetic texts the manifold dimensions of the differences between semantic, exemplifying, and analogical relations of meaning have to be taken into account, which may, with respect to a given text, be mutually in competition or in support. We illustrate this with the example of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Chandos letter. Exemplifications and analogies often enlarge the spectrum of meaning of poetic texts (5). Among the requirements of text interpretations we also count general background assumptions. In addition to heuristic assumptions there are presumptions. While hypothetical assumptions do not have to be justified a priori and while assertions do require proof, for a presumption the burden of proof lies with the critic. The status of a presumption is determined by the epistemic situation in which the interpretation is carried out (6). When the validity of two hypotheses of interpretation is to be compared, the hypotheses have to be evaluated. The evaluation of the plausibility of an interpretation can refer to either the initial hypotheses or the results of the interpretation. We observe that, just like in the natural sciences, evaluative decisions are underdetermined. In this context we also briefly comment on some assumptions concerning the ›inference to the best explanation‹ (7). Finally, we deal with the often raised suspicion of circularity of hermeneutic arguments. This suspicion is frequently declared to be the central difference between inferences in the natural sciences as opposed to inferences in the humanities. Historically, the hermeneutic circle and its inevitability is an invention of modernity. It can be shown systematically that not every circular inference needs to be vicious. Rather, whether it is vicious or not is rather determined by the epistemic situation. As long as the implicit knowledge that guides an argument is not fully explored, the circular or non-circular character of an argument cannot be judged (8).

Explorando a diferença cultural através da tradução de literatura infantil

This article is descriptive in nature, presenting a student-faculty project in which participants translated a short children’s story from German into English in order to explore the cultural embeddedness of language and the hermeneutic nature of translation. By reflecting on issues surrounding the translation of children’s literature and by imitating the situation of a professional translator, project participants gained insight into the workings of language and the complexities associated with translation.

Critical hermeneutics and higher education: a perspective on texts, meaning and institutional culture

This paper is a discussion of critical hermeneutics as a research methodology employed in a conceptual analytic study of the concept ‘institutional culture’ within the context of higher education. The research was undertaken to develop an understanding of the concept and to explore its construction in university policy documents. The aim of this paper is to motivate the choice of critical hermeneutics as a research methodology for the mentioned study. I explore both aspects of critical hermeneutics, namely hermeneutics and critical theory. The interpretive nature of hermeneutics enabled me to expose the hidden meanings of institutional culture, while its context-specific nature was beneficial for pointing out the nature of institutional culture in the university setting. Critical theory, on the other hand, was appropriate because it is a theory that is self-conscious about historicity and the role of the social environment. In combination, the merits of these two aspects of critical hermeneutics facilitated the understanding of the university setting as a social reality. Employing critical hermeneutics as a research methodology furthermore assisted in analysing the construction of institutional culture within university policy documents, taking into account the important role of history in interpretation. In essence, critical hermeneutics facilitated my understanding of the difficult-to-explain concept ‘institutional culture’ in the higher education setting.

Cursos de Graduação em Ecologia no Brasil: aproximações paradigmáticas

Desde o final do século XIX, a Ecologia vem passando por processos de ampliação e diversificação. Por isso, o presente estudo identificou os paradigmas que perpassam as propostas pedagógicas dos cursos de graduação em Ecologia. Entendemos cada curso como expressão de pensamentos e ações de uma comunidade científica, os quais influenciam a construção das concepções profissionais, bem como os conteúdos e as formas de suas investigações. A pesquisa caracteriza-se como qualitativa, de cunho documental e hermenêutico. Foram analisados todos os cursos de graduação em Ecologia no Brasil, que são oito no total. Concluímos que os projetos estruturados, a partir da virada do século, contemplam perspectivas mais complexas, ou seja, compreende-se que os organismos não são apenas partes de comunidades ecológicas, mas complexos ecossistemas, contendo uma multidão de organismos menores, dotados de uma considerável autonomia e, não obstante, harmoniosamente integrados no funcionamento do todo.

Work to be Done

As my title indicates, I believe there is still important work to be done in hermeneutics, particularly as regards three questions or really clusters of questions that I will turn to in the final section of my remarks. My proposals are motivated by two worries about philosophy as it presently exists. Let me say, first, though, that I do not intend to draw a distinction between what I have just called philosophical and then referred to as hermeneutic There may be important distinctions or nuances that could be drawn between these two labels, but I hope you will allow me here to use them interchangeably, or even simply to say It will suffice, in other words, in getting under way if we can agree that philosophy is philosophy that takes seriously the question of interpretation in relation to understanding, where understanding is both the result of interpretation and, quite paradoxically, also what motivates interpretation in the first place.Two general worries lie behind my belief that there is still work to be done. The first stems from a concern that talk about philosophy all too often today is reduced to recapitulating the history of hermeneutics. Most often this is presented as the history of so-called modern hermeneutics, the line that usually is presented as running from Schleiermacher through Dilthey to Heidegger to Gadamer and Ricoeur, with maybe a few other names mentioned as well: E. D. Hirsch or Ast or Vattimo, or even Derrida or even Nietzsche, for example. Sometimes this history extends back much further. This is likely to occur, for example, when one wants to include the history of interpretation of the Bible as an organizing thread. Then Luther, medieval fourfold exegesis, or the history of patristic or rabbinical modes of interpretation are likely to be included. Another long-term picture occurs when one is dealing with the history of history, in the sense of talk about the discipline that studies the past and the methods it uses and the results it is meant to produce. And sometimes this longer history of hermeneutics may be directed to the history of legal thought or, in even rarer cases, to literature or philosophy itself, although these latter cases usually get narrowed down to a specific period, to allegorical interpretations of Homer, for example, or to Hellenistic readings of early Greek philosophy. All these approaches to a historical understanding of the nature of hermeneutics can also take a more figure-oriented approach. Learning or talking about hermeneutics then means learning or talking-writing, actually-in more or less depth about Schleiermachers lectures on the topic, or Truth and Method, or some of Ricoeur's essays on the conflict of interpretations, or Augustine's distinction between the spirit and the letter. What is the problem here? In a word, repetition of what has already been said, even when the goal is to gain or convey greater insight-and greater understanding-into such classic figures or texts. To put it another way, such a historical approach to hermeneutics tends to reduce to an interpretation of what has already been said about interpretation in relation to understanding. In saying this, I do not mean to denigrate the value of a monographical approach to work that has already been done in hermeneutics. It has value. It may serve, for example, to help introduce a difficult text or thinker to a wider audience. It may also increase our understanding of how operative and thematic notions function in some portion of the existing tradition. So no, I am not condemning such work, only trying to add to it. My first point, then, is simply that there is more to be done under the heading of characterizing what it means to do philosophy.That interpretation in fact always begins from an existing interpretation is not necessarily a bad thing for hermeneutical philosophers. I think we would all agree that one of the great insights of hermeneutics is that we never begin from nowhere or nothing. …

SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY IN THEOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS: THE POTENTIAL OF LOVE FOR INTERFAITH ENCOUNTER

This article investigates the nature and significance of hermeneutics in theological thinking. Two principal approaches to hermeneutics in theology, i.e. a hermeneutics of revelation and a hermeneutics of signification, are examined and their respective implications for theological thinking are discussed within a Christian horizon. However, it is argued that all religious traditions need to come to terms with their respective linguistic and hermeneutical condition and with the plurality of interpretations arising from the necessary interplay between subject and object in every act of interpretation. A concept of love as critical human praxis is proposed as the most appropriate way of dealing with differences of understanding sacred texts, traditions and human experiences in this universe, culminating in the call for a hermeneutics of love in theology.

Fundamental phenomenological categories of garden and landscape

The current scientific methods describing gardens and landscapes all over the world are not always sufficient for the purpose of deep understanding of specific and close relations between landscape/garden and its inhabitants/visitors. A new dimension of qualitative investigation of these phenomena and relations between humans and the environment, as distinguished from the common mechanistic methods, has to be acquired. While a systematic anti-mechanistic research on the interaction of humans and living space is carried out especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, Continental Europe persist mechanistic in its core.In Continental Europe phenomenology as well as hermeneutics are regarded mostly as the particular areas of abstract philosophical studies that do not refer enough to practical sciences such as, for example, garden and landscape architecture. However, there are some especially transatlantic centres of applied phenomenological research. This article examines the phenomenological and hermeneutical approach as it might be used to explore the specific field of garden and landscape issues. In the first step, the nature of hermeneutics and phenomenology as compared to the common mechanistic scientific methods is discussed and the parallels between hermeneutics and phenomenology are outlined. Then, using the phenomenological method helps we give evidence on the fundamental categories of garden and landscape. These categories, in contrast to mechanistic constructions, represent garden and landscape as they are intimately experienced by humans. The focus of this research is both methodological (it is an effort to articulate a method alternative to the objectivity and abstraction of strict science, to be used in the field of garden and landscape architecture and related areas) and hermeneutical (it is an effort to achieve a deeper and profound understanding of garden and landscape as the irreplaceable base for every responsible interaction, whether scientific, creative, or other, with garden and landscape).

What Makes the World Go Round? Some Reformed Perspectives on Pneumatology and Ecology

Abstract This contribution explores the available literature on pneumatology and ecology. It suggests the need to articulate the underlying question to which Christian pneumatology may be regarded as a response, namely in terms of ‘What makes the world go round?’ Moltmann’s recent notion of a “hermeneutics of nature” is used to suggest the possibility of a pneumatology ‘from below’. However, the theological inadequacy of available proposals on such a pneumatology from below is also noted. This suggests the need for deeper pneumatological discernment.

Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800: The Cloister Disclosed by Barbara R. Woshinsky

Thériault brings to this understanding of Mallarmé as obscure a new dimension , by proposing an innovative reading of his work (through an examination, not only of certain major poetic works, but also of lesser-analyzed writings, such as Les dieux antiques and Crayonné au théâtre), by suggesting that Mallarmé was situated between the act of the mystification and that of the demystification of his subject. Revealing through his art both the primacy of language and the order of desire, Mallarmé is reconsidered in this study as a doubly complex thinker, as Thériault underscores the inherent jouissance of both writer and reader in what he describes as “l’économie du désir,” taking as a backdrop the theoretical musings of such figures as Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan. The dynamics of desire are thus posited as the basis for much of the hermeneutic nature of Mallarmé’s texts, and Thériault argues that the originality of Mallarmé’s position lies in the fact that the poet defines this desire, not as a sense of insuppressible energy, but as a sense of emptiness, a void. Following the work of Bertrand Marchal, Thériault further explores the epistemological foundation of the revelation of universal truth sought by the poet, notably in the prose of Les dieux antiques, with specific regard to the place of language and of myth in the Mallarméan model. In such a way, we can appreciate how the poet finds himself in a genuinely difficult position, trying to speak the unspeakable, to write that which is quite possibly beyond the scope of language, whether pragmatic or poetic, whether aesthetic or philosophical. Mallarmé’s project can be read through the methodological lens of the sociology of religions, with an emphasis on an archetypal phantasm deeply rooted in the human imaginary— the desire for direct communication with the absolute, the infinite, the immemorial . Not unlike the image of Apollo transmitting the enigmas of the oracle, or of Moses transcribing the divine word, Mallarmé’s poetic endeavor, epitomized in his unfulfilled aspiration to complete le Livre, can be read as a modern example of this age-old sacred enterprise. An additional area of exploration proposed by Thériault centers on the notion of subjectivity, through the presentation of another aspect of the core idea of revelation, i.e., how the poet does or does not reveal himself in his writings. Through a variety of discursive approaches and figures of speech—allusion, ellipsis, metaphor—the poet seems to suggest simultaneously his presence in his discourse and his paradoxical disappearance. Described as “[u]ne apparition en forme de disparition” (29), Mallarmé’s stance unveils an equivocal, protean nature, always poised on the threshold of the text, Janus-like, both here and not-here, accessible and obscure. University of Oklahoma Pamela A. Genova WOSHINSKY, BARBARA R. Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800: The Cloister Disclosed. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7546-6754-4. Pp. 344. $119.95. This wide-ranging book analyzes the politics of the convent and its representations in literature from the Catholic Reformation through the Enlightenment and beyond. Both “refuge and lockup” (300), the convent is a complex womancentered alternative community that occupied a unique position in the early 1176 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 modern imaginary. The architectural enclosure may be understood as a woman’s body and vice versa. Cloistering was never as strictly enforced as we may imagine ; instead, convents saw a “dialectic of containment and privacy” (27). This fruitful tension drives the book’s analysis of the convent as both an architectural and a social institution. One of the delights of Woshinsky’s book is its treatment of little-known texts together with canonical works. Alongside the pleasure of discovering relatively unknown texts, this book offers the opportunity to encounter fresh readings of familiar ones. The author skillfully uses the motif of the convent to draw together disparate works. The analysis includes texts by many women writers who are finally making inroads toward the canon (into its parloir if not its cloître). Woshinsky’s book includes twenty-six illustrations, running from high-resolution to blurred, and the occasional footnote to...

Teachers’ lack of deeper analytical reflections: who is to blame?

Reflective practice through journal writing is among the concepts that are introduced to teachers by my institution during the six-month long Certificate in Education Programmes (CEPs). The objective is to enable teachers to develop professionally by learning from their own practice after completion of the programmes. However, this can only occur if teachers are able to critically analyse issues, events and situations within their practice. Over the years, it has been realised that most teachers are unable to critically reflect. This study was of a qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological nature. The sample included eight CEP graduate teachers and four facilitators of the programmes. Semi-structured interviews were the sole method of data collection. The study established that apart from the way reflective practice is introduced to the teachers, other factors such as language, teachers’ attitude and their lack of capacity are responsible for how they understand reflective practice, thus impacting on how they write their reflections in their journals.

The Hermeneutical and Rhetorical Nature of Law

This article was presented at a Symposium at Villanova Law School devoted to Jean Porter's book, "Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority (2010). Porter engages the natural law philosophy of the early Scholastic period from our modern perspective and its attendant problems. Her approach provides helpful resources to deal with contemporary dilemmas such as gay marriage, but it also opens new possibilities for the development of natural law thinking. Her book is erudite, artfully presented, and provocative.In this article I view Professor Porter's successful resuscitation of a plausible account of natural law through a particular lens. My thesis is that we can productively extend her work by more strongly acknowledging the hermeneutical and rhetorical nature of law by drawing on the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Chaim Perelman. I argue that natural law is best understood as "naturalized rhetoric." The ontological claims made by Gadamer and Perelman establish that human nature is radically hermeneutical and rhetorical, and it is this nature that should serve as the focus of an inquiry into the natural law. Simply put, it is our persistent human condition to continuously recreate ourselves and our society through rhetorical exchanges with others. A naturalized rhetoric embraces the paradox that nonessentialism is essential to our being, that we can find a foundation for reflection in antifoundationalism.My discussion is divided into three parts. First, I survey Professor Porter's argument and establish that she regards hermeneutical and rhetorical practices as critical features of her natural law account. Next, I develop my conception of a naturalized rhetoric. Finally, I explore how this account expands and deepens Professor Porter's natural law account of legal authority. I conclude that we should recognize law's rhetorical and hermeneutical nature, but that Porter has demonstrated the necessity of taking into account the Scholastics' natural law philosophy as part of this project.

Rabbinic Philosophy of Language: Not in Heaven

AbstractI argue that “sampling” is at the heart of rabbinical hermeneutics. I argue further that anomalous monism—and specifically its arguments about token identity, of which sampling is one species—provides some insight into understanding the nature of rabbinical hermeneutics and religion, where truth is contingent on social judgment but is nevertheless objective. These points are illustrated through a close reading of the story of the oven of Aknai in the Bavli’s Baba Metzia. I claim that rabbinic Judaism represents an early attempt to integrate written texts into communicative processes, and thus frame the essay by comparing it to more recent computational technologies.

Reflective practice: the challenge of journal writing

Reflective practice is one of the concepts that the Aga Khan University‐Institute for Educational Development, Eastern Africa values as essential for teacher learning and development. It is incorporated in the Certificate in Education Programmes that target practising primary teachers. Emphasis is given to journal writing as an approach to reflective practice. However, many teachers seem to find it challenging to sustain this approach. This was a small‐scale study which was conducted in Dar‐es‐Salaam, Tanzania, to investigate why this might be the case. It is a qualitative study of a hermeneutic phenomenological nature. Semi‐structured interviews were the sole method of data collection. The Miles and Huberman approach of qualitative data analysis was utilised. Findings indicated that teachers encounter a number of challenges that inhibit them from reflecting through journaling. These range from lack of time, the structure of the programmes and the way reflective practice is introduced to them, to teacher motivation and lack of structures to support the practice.

Negotiated Interaction: A Way out of Cul-de-sac in Reading Classrooms

hypothesized that hermeneutical nature of passage interpretation could create “affordances”, Van Lier’s (2000) term, or “interactional opportunities” which are psycholinguistically and developmentally valuable crucibles for “negotiated interaction” and subsequently enhancement of reading comprehension. To this end, 24 randomly-selected intermediate-level English learners, having been divided into two equal homogeneous scaffolded (experimental) and non-scaffolded (control) groups, were subjected to 15 half-an-hour reading activities. Whereas the non-scaffolded group proceeded individually, the scaffolded groups did reading tasks interactively; they read the passages for themselves, publicized their reading problems, discussed the difficulties with each other, and wrote a joint summary. On the 15th session a post-test (unseen texts) was administered. Pretest and posttest results were compared using Wilcoxon Match Pairs Signed Ranks Test, indicating that scaffolded reading enhanced the reading ability of the readers.

Obadiah—Jonah—Micah in Canonical Context: The Nature of Prophetic Literature and Hermeneutics

A series of observations concerning the books of Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah raise questions about prophecy's very nature and pose the issues of definition and interpretation in a way that can help to address this problem for modern readers of biblical prophecy.

Theological Hermeneutics: Interpreting “The Lost Garden of Immediacy”

Contemporary hermeneutics has turned from the art of textual interpretation to the world – constitutive functions of language and symbolic representation. It is stressed that all understanding takes place within horizons constituted by history and language. Building on the ultimate religious foundations of divinely revealed truth, theological hermeneutics reflects upon theology as the site of a circular mediation of Scripture, tradition, and culture. The guiding question of this article is: can a theological hermeneutics retranslate philosophical sources into the language of theology? For these purposes we must at first situate the theological phenomenon of Verbum at the center of philosophical hermeneutics. Secondly, it is necessary to give a brief account of how symbols (all in general and some in particular) function in religious language. Also, we can see that in the face of the dawn of some traditional religious symbols, we can find new ones emerging from new strategies of theological hermeneutics in the face of new ontology. The analysis of symbolic nature of theological hermeneutics directs us to the question of analogy. Eventually the subject of investigations turns to be “validity” of analogical language in theological hermeneutics, which have some paradoxical consequences. On the other hand, it is clear that these paradoxes are not simply about formal matters. It is amazing that the basic symbol functioning in analogical language for expressing the proper language of God-talk (theology) is the language itself.

From the Critique of Judgement to the Hermeneutics of Nature

From the Critique of Judgement to the Hermeneutics of Nature

Bachelard's Subversive Hermeneutics: A Reading of "Lightning "in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound

AbstractThe purpose of this piece is to probe the nature of Bachelard's subversive hermeneutics by focusing on his predilection for those often unsettling poetic intuitions which emerge with the force of a summons in the experience of reading. My wager is that the hermeneutics of literary texts proposed by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1957) has its antecedents in his polemical theory of "discontinuous time" and the accompanying "pedagogy of discontinuity" set forth in his early work L'Intuition de l'instant: essai sur la Siloé de Gaston Roupnel (1932). The task of this hermeneutics, epitomized by Bachelard's own reading of Siloé, is to detect the ruptures, burning questions, or surprising insights that spark and (re)orient the movement of our life projects, with a view to unfolding the ethical implications of the "call of an instant" upon our sense of intimate duration and history. In the second half of this essay I proceed to set this hermeneutics into motion through a reading of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound that focuses on "lightning" as an image of Bachelardian "instants" in this drama—critical moments charged with contradictions that ultimately seem to steer the poet's course in directions, or towards ethical possibilities, other than his controlling artistic will could have charted out in advance.

A corte no exílio: Civilização e poder no Brasilás vésperas da independência (1808 a 1821)

Some historians of the independence period in Brazil have been faulted for giving more space to the November 1817 nuptials of Prince Pedro and Princess Leopoldina in Rio de Janeiro than to the revolt in Pernambuco a few months earlier. Jurandir Malerba invites such criticism by making the royal wedding the subject of the first of the five “acts” into which he divides A corte no exílio, while scarcely mentioning the Northeastern uprising anywhere in the book. No such criticism is warranted, because civilization and power in Brazil were indeed concentrated in Rio on the eve of independence, and, as the author amply demonstrates, the transformations symbolized by the festivities of November 1817 did more to shape the emerging Brazilian state than did any regional insurrection. Grounded in the thought of Norbert Elias and his disciples, Malerba approaches the civilizing and state-building processes in Brasil joanino with an eye for the sociology of the arts—especially the theater (Act II). He principally deals with the impact of the court presence in Rio on the customs and manners of the local residents in Act III, discusses the changing role of the monarch in Act IV, and examines the formation of a new nobility from old elites in Act V.Malerba focuses on monuments and artifacts, scenes of everyday life and public spectacles as rendered by artists of the time, official reports and panegyric literature, and accounts by private observers. Scholars are familiar with virtually all this material. The author acknowledges as much in the epigraph and reminds the reader of it at the end of the book, citing Blaise Pascal: “Si les matières ne sont pas nouvelles, la disposition en est nouvelle” (pp. 7, 296). Malerba’s approach to documents is more exegetic than historiographic. He mixes letters and reports into his text in their entirety, from salutation to closing, with the original orthography intact. Long quotations—either in the original language or from published translations—from John Luccock, Louis de Freycinet, Luís Gonçalves dos Santos, and other familiar sources are strewn through the book. What may be unacceptable in a narrative history is perhaps necessary in a work of this hermeneutic nature, but the sheer volume of quoted material seems excessive. Much of it could have been omitted or relegated to appendixes without weakening the analysis.Malerba concludes that the adaptation of court etiquette to the colonial society and tropical environment of Rio, and the awarding of titles of nobility and other honorifics to wealthy residents, strengthened the attachment of the fluminense elite to the monarchist ideology. The lower orders of society, including city slaves, enjoyed the spectacles and were mollified by the expansion of the Portuguese institution of the royal beija mão (hand kissing) in Brazil, and by other concessions, such as the toleration of the ceremonial court of the Congo King in Rio. Most importantly, the author finds that when King João VI and his court departed Rio in 1821, they left power in the hands of a new nobility composed almost exclusively of big import-export merchants and slave traders. Malerba’s findings support the view that native landowners contributed little to the founding of Brazil’s independent monarchy. Later, however, the interests of the landowners would coincide with those of the slave importers, and together they would force the abdication of Brazil’s first emperor.A corte no exílio is by no means the definitive study of this remarkable prelude to Brazilian independence. More comprehensive, and no less thoughtful, is Kirsten Schultz’s magisterial Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (Routledge, 2001). What Malerba offers are rare ontological insights into the body of knowledge on which the Brazilian monarchy was established.

What happens when one picks up the Greek text?

A few issues of hermeneutic nature related to Bible translation are considered. It is argued that the chosen philosophical framework (for instance, a modernist or postmodern approach) determines the way in which any process of translation is approached. Attention then shifts to some of the presuppositions and assumptions of literal translations. These presuppositions are discussed critically. Another factor determining the nature of a translation is the intended function of that particular translation. If, for instance, the intended function is to be understandable for ordinary, present-day readers, a meaning-orientated translation would be preferable. Lastly, the role of interpretation in the translation process is considered. The assumption that no interpretation takes place in the case of word-for word translations is critiqued. (Acta Theologica, Supplementum 2, 2002: 246-265)