The concept of hermeneutical experience is conceived analogously to that of aesthetic, religious or empirical experience. The unique nature of hermeneutical experience is the comprehension of the meaning of artificial signs or sign-systems, such as art, literature, laws, institutions, actions, etc. It may be questioned how far and to what extent hermeneutical experience is second-hand experience, i.e., secondary to primary experience expressed in signs, or, following a well-known formula of Boeckh, a ‘recognition of what (...) has been recognized before’. (shrink)

This paper provides a commentary on Truth and Method III.1.

Following some remarks of Jacques Taminiaux on Gadamer, I examine the permeating presence of history and alterity in interpretation by contrasting Gadamer’s views with Davidson’s notion of “radical interpretation.” I start by examining the debate they held with each other on several occasions. I then analyze Gadamer’s understanding of interpretation as a “hermeneutic experience” and Davidson’s method of “triangulation.” They both agree that interpretation should be free from the psychological turmoil of either divining an author’s intent or projecting (...) the reader’s expectations. The fundamental difference is that, for Davidson, interpretation is an ahistorical process taking place in the synchrony of interpreter and observed subjects, whereas for Gadamer interpretation is a historical “event,” in which something “happens” and contributes to the making of history. (shrink)

At the heart of our experience of literature is the idea that fiction can show us new possibilities for the world in which we live. I open up fictional worlds’ hermeneutic dimension by investigating the intersection of Roman Ingarden’s analytic phenomenology of the literary work with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Reading Ingarden together with Gadamer, I understand a fictional world as an orientation towards a fictional environment whose foundation is our capacity for language, showing how the reciprocal relationship (...) in which we discover its fictional objects and states of affairs is of the same kind that exists between language and world, so that fiction can be understood to orient us towards the happening of language. By thinking on the relationship between language and experience, I suggest that Ingarden and Gadamer propose to understand a fictional world as an orientation towards our very capacity to be otherwise and to exceed ourselves. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics contributes in an essential way to the understanding that truth cannot be adequately explained by scientific method. Hermeneutics then is not a method of interpretation, but is an investigation into the nature of understanding, which transcends the concept of method.

Following some remarks of Jacques Taminiaux on Gadamer, I examine the permeating presence of history and alterity in interpretation by contrasting Gadamer’s views with Davidson’s notion of “radical interpretation.” I start by examining the debate they held with each other on several occasions. I then analyze Gadamer’s understanding of interpretation as a “hermeneutic experience” and Davidson’s method of “triangulation.” They both agree that interpretation should be free from the psychological turmoil of either divining an author’s intent or projecting (...) the reader’s expectations. The fundamental difference is that, for Davidson, interpretation is an ahistorical process taking place in the synchrony of interpreter and observed subjects, whereas for Gadamer interpretation is a historical “event,” in which something “happens” and contributes to the making of history. (shrink)

In his attack on the notion of immediate experience, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that aesthetic experience should be absorbed into hermeneutics because alone it cannot account for the historical nature of experience ; predicated on an ontological theory of art, the unfathomable, therefore, is the sense we have of these infinite hermeneutic depths. I argue that this account is methodologically and existentially unacceptable: methodologically because it is overly speculative, and existentially because it betrays authentic existence. I critique (...) Gadamer from the perspective of William James’ Pragmatism and argue, inverting Gadamer’s main thesis, that hermeneutics should be reduced to aesthetic experience. The meaning that emerges in aesthetic experience does not ‘rise up’ from the depths but is immanent in what James calls ‘pure experience’. The unfathomable, therefore, is not a glimpse into the metaphysical abyss but a phenomenological insight into the immanent structure of experience. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to analyse the fundamentals of Eliade’s view of the History of Religions, with a focus on the origins of this view, in the context of the criticism against the field of study corresponding to religious studies as they have developed over the last two centuries. The first part of the study briefly evaluates religious studies as to where it falls on a spectrum ranging from scientific objectivity to ideology, while the second part aims at (...) developing the hypothesis according to which the principles of the study of religions are found in the notion of “experience,” under the determinative influence of Nae Ionescu’s lectures. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the notion of clinical medicine as a hermeneutical enterprise and to bridge the gap between the general perspectives of hermeneutics and the particularities of medical practice. The case of a patient with low back pain is analyzed. The discussion centers around the metaphor of the patient as a text and a model of five social discourses about low back pain. The problems addressed are: (1) the nature of a moral experience, (...) (2) the variety of available texts, (3) the difference between the doctor's and patient's narratives, and (4) the patient's and doctor's responsibility regarding the existential, biographical meaning of an illness. Although many problems are left unsolved, it is argued that from a philosophical point of view the notion of medicine as a hermeneutical enterprise opens up the possibility of gaining insight in the foundations of the clinical encounter. (shrink)

RESUMEN Se busca mostrar la mutua correspondencia entre experiencia e historicidad en la obra de H.-G. Gadamer. La experiencia es entendida como el movimiento fundamental de la existencia histórica, la cual articula las diversas esferas de la acción humana. La experiencia hermenéutica pone de manifiesto que el comprender no puede fundarse en un procedimiento metódico, sino en la forma del existir situado en el mundo. El acto hermenéutico es entendido como un continuo proceso de apropiación que se realiza mediante el (...) lenguaje, y como un ámbito en el que se van actualizando nuevos significados que develan el carácter aconteciente y móvil de la interpretación. Por ello, la historicidad de la comprensión será el principio hermenéutico fundamental que excluye la posibilidad de una conciencia histórica absoluta, a favor de una "conciencia de la repercusión histórica" (wirkungsgeschtliches Bewußtseins). ABSTRACT The article seeks to show the mutual correspondence between experience and historicity in the work of H.-G. Gadamer. Experience is understood as the fundamental movement of historical existence, since it articulates the different spheres of human action. Hermeneutical experience reveals that understanding cannot ground itself in a methodical procedure, but rather in the situated form of being in the world. The hermeneutic act is understood as a continuous process of appropriation carried out through language, and as the sphere in which new meanings are actualized, thus revealing the nature of interpretation as an event. Therefore, the historicity of understanding is the fundamental hermeneutic principle, which excludes the possibility of absolute historical consciousness in favor of "effective historical consciousness" (wirkungsgeschtliches Bewußtseins). (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show how philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin related to the hermeneutical tradition — and tried to move beyond it by ‘redeeming’ human experience, while avoiding the pitfalls of the philosophy of ‘authenticity’. Though convinced that questions relating to historicity were central to any understanding of modern human experience, Benjamin explicitly rejected the Heideggerian alternative, and chose a path closer to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s. He attempted to combine theological interpretation with dialectical materialism, always (...) grounding hermeneutics in the concrete manifestations of social life, inaugurating a method which I suggest could be called ‘hermeneutical materialism’. At stake was a politically motivated defence of the ‘mimetic faculty’ — understood as (re)interpretation — in the modern, technologically organized world. (shrink)

The most prevalent approach to understanding recreation experiences in resource management has been a motivational research program that views satisfaction as an appropriate indicator of experience quality. This research explores a different approach to studying the quality of recreation experiences. Rather than viewing recreation experiences as a linear sequence of events beginning with expectations and ending with outcomes that are then cognitively compared to determine experience quality, this alternative approach views recreation as an emergent experience motivated by (...) the not very well-defined goal of acquiring stories that ultimately enrich one's life. Further, it assumes that the nature of human experience is best characterized by situated freedom in which the environment sets boundaries that constrain the nature of the experience, but that within those boundaries recreationists are free to experience the world in unique and variable ways. Therefore this alternative approach seeks a more context specific description of the setting/experience relationship that is intended to complement more general management frameworks (e.g., the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum) developed in conjunction with the motivational research program. (shrink)

The chapter approaches the hermeneutic concept of experience introduced by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) from the perspective of the conceptual history of experience in the Western philosophical tradition. Through an overview of the concept and the epistemological function of experience (empeiria, experientia, Erfahrung) in Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Hegel, it is shown that the tradition has considered experience first and foremost in methodological terms, that is, as a pathway towards a form of (...) scientific knowledge that is itself increasingly immune to experience. Science strives “beyond” experience because of the limitations inherent in the fundamentally contingent, singular, and negative character of experience: experience comes to us through unpredictable chance encounters and in singular situations and negates, tests, or “imperils” previous knowledge, thereby transforming it. By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics rethinks experience precisely in terms of these limitations. In the hermeneutic approach articulated by Gadamer and Claude Romano, experience is an encounter with the irreducible finitude and historical situatedness of one’s understanding and conceptual framework, an encounter with an otherness that puts our preunderstanding to test and requires us to revise it. Hermeneutic experience is thus a singular event that irreparably transforms us. (shrink)

This study seeks to understand the subjective experience or lived world typical of patients with Parkinson’s disease. It uses qualitative methodology, grounded in a hermeneutic-phenomenological perspective, to consider lived experience in a small sample of 7 individuals. The analysis identified four themes that appear to be characteristic of the experience of PD: A) Denial, B) Emotion and symptom expression, C) Volitional and spontaneous action, and D) Alteration of temporal perspective. Concepts from existential-phenomenological philosophy were used to (...) reflect upon these themes to achieve a synthetic account of the subjective experience of PD. The findings of the study are compared to other findings in the phenomenological literature, and suggestions for further research are posed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this study, the learning experiences of four elementary school teachers who were basketball coaches were explored. Specifically, the learning experiences gained through observing professional basketball coaches’ sessions were examined by employing van Manen’s hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, which focuses on the thematic analysis of lived experiences. Previous coaching studies that have focused on the professional development of coaches have revealed that observing elite coaching sessions could be a major source of practical coaching knowledge because coaches could learn from experienced (...) coaches. Quantitative studies of this learning effect have revealed that observers learn new coaching methods from a general perspective. However, this study revealed that teachers give specific meaning and value to observed phenomena from the perspective of personal interest based on their coaching or teaching beliefs. This learning was interpreted from a multifaceted perspective, which was evident from their coaching interests and questions. This study disclosed that teachers reflect on their coaching philosophy, methods and attitude. Furthermore, even if teachers generally tend to highlight their coaching methods, this has a qualitatively complex nature because the meaning and value given to coaching methods varied in each teacher’s reflection. The perspective of problem-solving highlighted how to answer their personal questions based on practical coaching problems by observing a coaching session. Discovering the methodological differences between the observation session and the daily coaching session were highlighted. (shrink)

Currently, there is a resurgence of interests in phenomenology in education. This article sheds light on the importance of hermeneutical phenomenology in teaching and learning based on the lived experience of a Sioux Indian adolescent boy, elicited from an ethnographic case study conducted at an alternative high school in the US. Employing narrative inquiry, this article seeks phenomenological ways of understanding students' lived experiences and explores the meaning of the pedagogical practice of hermeneutical phenomenology in education. I delve into (...) how hermeneutical understanding of the phenomena of students' lived experience can catapult both students and teachers into the personal growth and development in a reciprocal way. It is my hope that such an understanding will facilitate an educational aim that focuses on the ontology of being and becoming while students' existence is brought to the center of teaching and learning. (shrink)

Hermeneutics is usually defined as the theory and practice of interpretation. As a discipline it involves a long and complex history, starting with concerns about the proper interpretation of literary, sacred, and legal texts. In the twentieth century, hermeneutics broadens to include the idea that humans are, in Charles Taylor’s phrase, ‘self-interpreting animals’ (Taylor, 1985). In contrast to the narrowly prescriptive questions of textual interpretation, philosophical hermeneutics, as developed by thinkers like Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, raises questions about the conditions (...) of possibility for human understanding — not how we should interpret or understand something, but what interpretation and understanding are and how they work. For the nineteenth-century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the hermeneutical disciplines were very different from the disciplines of science, including the newly emerging science of psychology. In contrast to psychology, which, in part, attempts to explain the natural behaviour of human animals in causal terms, Dilthey (1926) thinks of the hermeneutical disciplines as attempting to under- stand the behaviour of human persons in terms of their experience and inner motivation. Inner life is not composed of a series of mechanistic starts and stops, but is woven together into a continuity (Zusammenhang) that has a structure, by.. (shrink)

Hermeneutic Research: An Experiential Method presents a method to investigate lived experiences. In doing so, this book integrates a broad range of philosophical topics, such as hermeneutics, the philosophy of consciousness, and the philosophy of being. We are conscious beings. Through every act of consciousness, something is presented to the experiencing person. Something--a theme--stands in the focus of attention. Within the dimensional human consciousness, this theme is related to other thoughts, a process that includes certain aspects of the theme (...) and excludes others from conscious experience. The foundational conviction of the experiential method detailed in this book is that thought is not static in its ultimate nature but organically dynamic. Thought uncovers its internal endlessness through time as its medium, just as the small seed uncovers the unity of a tree through soil as its medium. Thought, as a dynamic self-revealing phenomenon, uncovers itself as a series of understandings that cannot be interpreted except through reciprocal reference. Meaningfulness, therefore, is not contained in self-identity but in the larger whole in which it is a specific part. Wholeness contains possibilities of knowledge as present realities revealing themselves, through human choices and experiences, in temporal progression to reach a unity that is already contained in them. This infinite movement of knowledge thus reveals the possibility intrinsic to finite thought. Intuition, as wholistic apprehension, is movement that could acknowledge and reach an immanent infinite, of which the finite concepts of comprehension and cognition are only momentums. (shrink)

Either beauty is the beholding of a fixed and final aesthetic essence discontinuous with the rest of nature, or it is an intuitive grasp and encompassing feel of a consummated movement of natural energies and elements through their inner relations into a single, qualitative unity, whose pervasive tonality is a situational emergent from the biologically active, temporally continuous, and reciprocally constituting-constituted transactional dialectic between a human creature and the world. If aesthetic-mystical experience is indeed something “eternalized” out of all (...) connection with ordinary experience and the flood of moving fact, then what is immediately entailed is a phenomenological profile conceived as.. (shrink)

Understanding each patient's situation or lived experience evolves from a nurse's sincere communication with the patient. Through rhetoric, the nurse's use of competent language and expressions is more likely to engage the patient in a dialogical discussion that brings forth an open, honest display of feelings and emotions. Through hermeneutics, the nurse gains an accurate understanding and interpretation of a patient's beliefs, values, and situations that supports explanations of meaning. Thus, with rhetoric being the words or expressions that give (...) rise to hermeneutics or the interpretation, the blending of the two creates a rhetorical–hermeneutical relationship that provides accurate understanding of a patient's true lived experience. Consequently, knowing the patient depends upon the nurse's rhetorical competence and accurate assessment of each patient's authentic self. Nurses should seek to interpret and understand the lived experiences of patients in order to limit or prevent misunderstandings and inaccuracies in communication. The truth that emerges from the expressed rhetorical–hermeneutical interrelationship will enhance nurses’ sensitivity to patient matters, produce relationship outcomes that emerge from a consistent and effectively applied set of interpersonal principles, and more importantly, successfully influence nurses’ lives and those of their patients with meaning that ultimately improves the human condition. Thus, nurses’ communication and perceptive understanding of each patient's world or lived experience becomes an integral and necessary component to effectively carrying out the practice role of caregiving. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between hermeneutical injustice in religious settings and religious trauma and spiritual violence. In it I characterize a form of hermeneutical injustice that arises when experiences are obscured from collective understanding by normatively laden concepts, and I argue that this form of HI often plays a central role in cases of religious trauma and spiritual violence, even those involving children. In section I, I introduce the reader to the phenomena of religious trauma and spiritual violence. In (...) section II, I describe the role normatively laden concepts play in shaping our social experience. I then elucidate how they can contribute to HI. In section III, I provide a brief overview of the history of some significant identity prejudices in the history of Christianity and argue that children can properly be understood as victims of HI within some religious communities. I then return in section IV to the examples of religious trauma and spiritual violence offered throughout the article and demonstrate that HI plays an important causal role in each of them. HIs sometimes constitute spiritual and religious harms; at other times they create an epistemic environment conducive to spiritual abuse. (shrink)

Abe Masao 阿部正雄 is accepted by many as a member of the Kyoto School of philosophy, known primarily for its role in drawing together distinct traditions of Western and Asian thought.1 Abe was a key figure in this respect, dedicating much of his career to dialogue with Western philosophers and theologians.2 Through his many essays, translations, lectures, and conversations, Abe brought Zen Buddhism to audiences in Europe and the United States. In particular, he introduced his own interpretation of the philosophy (...) of Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and his followers, to Western audiences. Through his work in Japanese, especially his final essays, Abe also developed a more personal perspective and... (shrink)

This book explores three interrelated roots of scholarly work that have a supportive and elaborative affinity to authentic and engaging classroom inquiry: ecological consciousness, Buddhist epistemologies, philosophies and practices, and interpretive inquiry or «hermeneutics». Although these three roots originate outside of and extend far beyond most educational literature, understanding them can be of immense practical importance to the conduct of rich, rigorous, practicable, sustainable, and adventurous classroom work for students and teachers alike. The authors collectively bring to these reflections decades (...) of classroom experience in grades K-12 and the experience of supervising hundreds of student teachers in such settings as well as working regularly with schools and classroom teachers in their day-to-day work. The authors demonstrate, through several classroom examples, how ecology, Buddhism, and hermeneutics provide ways to re-invigorate the often-moribund discourse of education and bring a sense of beauty and rigorous joy to classroom life for teachers and students alike. (shrink)

This collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in religion in North America explores the complex relationship between the academic study of religion and personal religious experience. Each volume in this new series explores a central theme or topic that has informed the religious experiences of humanity throughout history. Each theme is discussed from a comparative perspective using a variety of methodological approaches.

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 269-282, September 2022.

A study of the interface between philosophical hermeneutics and the philosophical theory of education, yielding a hermeneutical approach to education--an approach that calls into question the current models of educational experience and ...

The article presents an overview of A. S. Akhiezer’s reconstruction of Russia’s socio-cultural history as a cultural hermeneutic. The underlying idea is that the way humans make sense of their existence is driven by an algorithm of meaning production informing the organization of their ‘world’, in particular the selection of the means involved in that production. Thus the central axis of Akhiezer’s hermeneutic, methodogically, is symbolization: ‘worlds’, that is, socio-cultural matrices, are made according to and reflect specific modes (...) of symbolization. Akhiezer’s account of the Russian socio-cultural experience is centred on the particular algorithm that he names raskol. His purpose was twofold: to examine the ‘logic’ of raskol, on the one hand, and to investigate, on the other hand, in the manner of a historian, its impact and consequences for Russian society at large, including its effects on institution-building. In this way, the study of raskol goes hand in hand with an investigation of and commentary concerning the uncertain state in Russia of what Akhiezer named the bol’šoe obščestvo. In effect, his theory is a social ontology with culture at the centre. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a gap in the interpretive resources available to members of a society due to the marginalization of members of a social group from sense‐making practices. In this paper, I address two questions about hermeneutical injustice that are undertheorized in the recent literature: (1) what do we mean when we say that someone lacks the interpretive resources for making sense of an experience? and (2) how do marginalized individuals develop interpretive resources? In response to (...) (1), I argue that to lack interpretive resources is to lack conceptual skill or know how. In response to (2), I draw on resources from Gilbert Ryle and Andy Clark and provide a model of how marginalized individuals develop new conceptual skills by naming their shared experience and using it as a tool for scaffolding each other's conceptual performance. At the same time, I draw on the work of Gaile Pohlhaus and Kristie Dotson to show how these practices succeed only through the redistribution of epistemic power across differently situated social groups. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Historical Background: Philosophical Continuities and Discontinuities Behind the Project of Being and Time The New Conceptual Framework: The Ontological Difference The Hermeneutic Notion of World The Priority of Understanding over Perception The Fore‐structure of Understanding Cognition as a Mode of Interpretation.

Whilst hermeneutics had been traditionally associated with the interpretation of texts, Martin Heidegger gave it a new meaning, associating it with the interpretation of the existence of Dasein. This paper will explain the Heideggerian understanding of hermeneutics, based on the early work of Heidegger which focuses on the analysis of the being of Dasein. His main contribution was a shift of focus from the interpretation of an unknown object to the interpretation of the human being, which Heidegger sees as primary, (...) since it is on the basis of Dasein’s understanding that other things and beings are interpreted. Firstly, the paper discusses hermeneutics in relation to human being, with a brief introduction to the main characteristics of Dasein, showing the place of hermeneutics within Dasein’s existence, together with Heidegger’s re-interpretation of the hermeneutic circle. Secondly, this understanding is applied to sport, focusing on the experience of athletes and on the possibilities for interpretations towards authentic existence, including its ethical aspect. (shrink)