The aim of the paper is to present moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre in its relation to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. For that purpose, his specific understanding of the tradition, a mode of its relation with an individual, and the distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge are discussed in the paper. Considered primarily as Thomist and Marxist thinker, MacIntyre’s conceptions emerge as strongly influenced by continental hermeneutics. From the hermeneutical point of view, some key elements of MacIntyre’s thought can be understood in a new way, enabling in this way to overcome the most commonly expressed reservations formulated against his views.
This article is based on two main concepts of hermeneutic experience (Dilthey's and Heidegger's approaches). The issues discussed concern, among other things, the question of relation between the experiencing subject's attitude and the content being experienced. The latter (objective importance) is rendered discernible from the objective content. In effect, the intentionality-based hermeneutic concept of experience reveals its basic feature: not only is daily experience independent as to content from a physical description of presence of a real object, but moreover, it constitutes the condition for soundness of the same.
An essay on the relationship between language (mother tongue) and the human subject and its existence. It develops ideas of the Prague School of structural literary analysis (in particular, those of Bohumil Trnka, Vladimir Skalicka, and Jan Mukarovsky), cognitive linguistics, and hermeneutics, employing the concept of cultural competence, including criticism of its state in contemporary Czech society.
The aim of this study is to present the document mentioned above and reflect on its content. First, the status and the nature of the ITC documents are discussed. The author subsequently presents the most important statements contained in the individual chapters. In the first chapter the document deals with the “Word of God” as opposed to the word of man. The author points out that the constitution Dei verbum is cited incorrectly in contemporary documents of the Church as Dei Verbum. In the second chapter the document clearly distinguishes between the apostolic tradition and ecclesiastic traditions. This step can be classified as a shifting of this meaning to the level of sententia communis. In the third chapter the principle stating that God is the proper object of theology is discussed. The document clearly reflects the spirit of Vatican Council II and consists of a definite appeal to a change in mentality in harmony with the requirements of the Gospel.
Is it possible to describe the conditions of understanding irony, or maybe irony itself, working just 'in the middle' of understanding, calls this enterprise into question? The first path was chosen by Wayne C. Booth (as A Rhetoric of Irony was not yet translated into Polish, his standpoint was in a few words summarized), the latter - by Paul de Man, who defined irony as the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes. The author tries to show that we should follow the direction of a famous deconstructionist, and that at the same time it is very important to stress the pessimism manifest in his theory. Does an ironist really leave us with no support? Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz (the third hero of the text) with his books on literary history turns out to be very helpful in discovering hermeneutical aspects of irony.
The article deals with the relationship between philosophy and religious belief, in particular Christianity. It is a polemic against P. Dvorak and his view according to which there are logical relations between philosophy and the Christian message. The function of philosophy (and theology) is not to draw conclusions from factual statements inherent in the Christian message, since the key propositions of the latter are of a different kind (profession, parable, etc.) The nature of philosophical treatment of Christianity is hermeneutic as it searches for better understanding of the message. That in turn influences the content of the message without abolishing its specific character.
By the function of the arts, I understand the role that is ascribed to disciplinary organized knowledge in domain of the humanities, the role which they play in the making of diagnosis of the culture in statu nascendi. And by the aim of the arts, I understand the growth of knowledge about objectivized, publicly available phenomena of culture. So we can ask: what a difference in our cultural milieu is generated by the growth of knowledge about cultural phenomena? What aims are satisfied by self-knowledge, and what kind of subjectivity is built on imperative of self-knowledge? There is no better way of emphasizing the connection between functions and aims of the arts as to emphasize historicity of culture and historicity of its interpretation. Herbert Rosendorfer in The Architect of Ruins provided an excellent portrait of this doubled historicity. In the parable of merchant, who makes an attempt at selling the collection of sculptures, he has showed how our culture is desynchronized in its modes of temporal organization. The common elements of culture are inherited in manifold, complex, non-monotonous and frangible sequences of times, which are never synchronized. There is no single temporal arrangement of a culture, and everybody who wants to recover original harmony is confronted with confusions. In the arts, there are two main strategies to cope with this situation. First, hermeneutical strategy, consists in combining the aim and function of the arts in a way, in which compensative function of the arts is bound with the aim of self-cognition, whereas the second, “archaeological” one (in the Foucauldian meaning), in opposition to hermeneutics, postulates disfamiliarization of culture as a means of preserving the aims of the arts consisting in objectivity of knowledge.
This paper presents certain aspect of intuitive reasoning in mathematics called the 'intuitive analysis of concepts' along some schemes of that kind of intuitive analysis. The method of the intuitive analysis of concept of polyhedra based on the historical findings as presented by Lakatos in 'Proofs and Refutations' is described. Some important consequences for phenomenology as well as philosophy and history of mathematics follow. Mathematical knowledge seems to be created within the 'hermeneutical horizon' distinct for ancient and modern mathematics.
The oeuvre of Michael Brötje, the creator of a new existential-hermeneutic research perspective in art history, includes numerous analyses of old art employing traditional religious iconography. The analysis of Otto Piene's work published in the current issue of Sacrum et Decorum is one of his rare interpretations of abstract art. In a key moment in the analysis, he invokes the famous concepts of tremendum and fascinosum, which were introduced over a century ago by Rudolf Otto to express the dual nature of the human experience of the sacred as something at once menacing and fascinating. The article seeks to present Brötje's theory and thus set the ground for the understanding of his analysis of Otto Piene's work. Brötje's theory grounds the human experience of art in the soul [Seele]: it is in the spiritual [seelisch], rather than the intellectual or the psychological, dimension that we can actualize our essential disposition, transcend towards that which determines us, and project the Absolute onto the mediating plane of the work of art. In the spiritual [seelisch] experience of the self, this process is unconscious; nevertheless, it remains firmly grounded in the logic of viewing. It is this logic that Brötje sets out to capture in his analyses. The analysis of Otto Piene should also be seen in this context. In the process of analysis, a gradual but systematic reconstruction of 'the viewing logic' brings the categories of Rudolf Otto up to the surface. The concepts of tremendum and fascinosum, however, are only used as indicators, which point back to the knowledge shared between the author and his readers and thus outline an area of reflection, which is parallel to the previous, 'fully valid perception' of the meaning of the work.
In this article we ask the question of whether it is possible to connect phenomenology with neuroscience so as to develop the concept of the unified human being, which could be the subject of both objective information and lived experience. This question we answer with the help of the neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and the phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur. Our finding is that while both authors express the need to bridge the gap between science and phenomenology, in fact they remain locked in their respective methodological frameworks. Although neuroscience says that it needs to exploit the findings of phenomenology in order to adequately grasp experience, instead it actually replaces experience with mental states. On the other hand although phenomenological hermeneutics would like to include objectivity in its operations, in fact it only simulates it by the process of the sedimentation of experience. This finding leads us to further reflections about the character of thinking and about reflection on the person. We are interested in the question of what gives rise to the thought that neuroscience and phenomenology should indeed be concerned with the same thing. What gives rise to the supposition that there should be two perspectival viewpoints on one and the same reality? We suppose, as the preceding study shows, thinking does not grasp reality but rather divides it in a certain way, always differently to another way of thinking. It is not, therefore, the case that we understand better and better what a person is, or that from a different perspective we may regard that same person, but rather that we mean by the concept of person various forms of selfoverlapping. It does not therefore make sense to attempt to create coherent closed systems for dealing with the identical human being, but rather that on the basis of one thinking to divide reality and begin to think differently.
Art is no arbitrary topic in Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Rather, it is a fundamental phenomenon, the description of which constitutes an unavoidable task of philosophy. In this article the author seeks to demonstrate the importance of art in philosophical hermeneutics, and in two major steps develops a hermeneutical conception of art. First, the author discusses the concept of the truth of art with special attention to the view that art can be described as the cognition of essence. Second, the ontology of the work of art is analyzed in detail, focusing on Gadamer's basic idea that the work of art becomes accessible, strictly speaking, only in its presentation.
Re-reading Plato's Ion as the first text in the hermeneutics tradition, the author finds two main streams. The first, based on reflection (rationality, logic, knowledge) stems from Socrates; the second, consisting in an affective approach (myth, art), stems from Ion. Both Socrates and Ion delimit this field of hermeneutics (legein peri or 'speaking about') staying beyond its frontiers. Next, the author exploits the Socrates: Ion binary in order to interpret some key figures, trends, and schools within the whole tradition (rabbis, St Augustine, Pietism, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Dilthey, explication de texte, Heidegger, Gadamer, Peter Szondi, the Nitra School, and Ricoeur). Writers tend towards either the Socratic (explication de texte) or Ionic wing (Nietzsche). There are, however, also writers who attempted to find the middle ground, a position offering both reflexion and intuition (Schleiermacher, Gadamer, and Ricoeur). The author concludes that the main challenge issuing from his interpretation is to remain close to a text, and resist any temptation to go beyond it.
The article would like to contribute to the discussion between Dvorak and Holub (see Nr. 18, 19 and 20 of this journal) concerning the relationship between 'belief, philosophy and theology' (Dvorak) and between 'philosophy and religious message' (Holub). The discussion seems not to address the same topic. Moreover, the standpoint of Holub disjoints the religious message from the answer of belief, and the point of view of Dvorak considers the believed content in complete abstraction from the act of belief. In neither case can the living reality of the religious act be achieved.
The aim of the article is to discuss Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic way of understanding the history of philosophy. I assume that hermeneutic reference to philosophical past appears as a unique dialogue with tradition, whereas their way of understanding the history of philosophy might be defined as “hermeneutic interpretation of tradition.” In order to show what its indicators are, I characterize the conception of hermeneutic experience (H.-G. Gadamer) as well as the issue of the interpretation process (P. Ricoeur). Those thinkers are convinced that understanding of the history of philosophy involves the recognition of our own historicity.
This article is an expression and an attempt to justify the belief that hermeneutic philosophy is an interpretation of the rationality’s concept. Although hermeneutics itself is a critique of a certain form of rationalism, and therefore falls under charges “irrationality”, the concept of reason is an essential component of its identity as a philosophy.
The article reconstructs and interprets the ideas of Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, as laid down in one of his best known books, 'La fine della modernita' (1985). The focus is on issues such as: the very notion of modernity; the end of history; exhaustion of emancipative utopias; nihilism as the central issue to modern European culture; Vattimo's varied understanding of hermeneutics, as well as his views on arts and aesthetics.
In the course of their dynamic development, fictionalised computer games have become sophisticated audiovisual cultural texts which are becoming more and more important and which convey increasingly powerful messages. The worldview aspects of these games, and the way these aspects are expressed reach far beyond the traditionally conceptualised area of “game” or “play” in the strict sense. The reports from the players’ experiences come close to those theories of relating to a text discussed in the works by Gadamer and Ricoeur. At the same time, the increasingly strong influence of the quasi-ethical dimension of the message contained in these games places this area of “virtual leisure” in the space of hermeneutical discourse.
The moment in which a theory is conceived as useless superstructure of activity, is critical for the understanding of thinking and acting as separated qualities. From one point of view this separation is being criticized, on the other hand, the proposal of making the connection assumes the separation, that was already rejected. Solving the problem requires reaching for the arguments against radical separation of thinking and acting and, to inquire about a possibility of some primary union of them. This is the moment in which the title category of 'thinking in which we act' emerges. Opposite to representing 'thinking of', thinking in which we act is understood as the space, the area, the 'horizon' within which different actions are undertaken. This way the dialog as a form of activity is a different action in the instrumental rationality, then it is in (e.g.) the hermeneutical - critical rationality.
This article aims at establishing a theoretical framework for the translation of classics. Based on hermeneutics, it presents translation as a historiographical undertaking in which the present acts as a horizon in the interpretation of the past. More specifically, translation is envisaged as an act of categorization of the work of the past within the contemporary collective imagination, according to a specific experience of temporality and a given vision of the classic as a cultural object of the past. Translated writing adds to this construction with the function of a poietic instrument, capable of generating a contemporary representation of the classic while writing its history and inscribing it in memory.