Hermeneutics has frequently been dismissed as useful only for literary and textual analysis. Some consider it to be Eurocentric or inherently relativistic and thus unsuited to social critique. Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument that hermeneutics is a valuable tool not only for critical theory but also for robustly addressing many of the urgent issues of today. Simpson demonstrates that hermeneutics exhibits significant interpretive advantages compared to competing explanatory modalities. While it shares with pragmatism a suspicion of essentialism, an understanding that disagreements are situated, and an insistence on the dialogical nature of understanding, it nevertheless resolutely rejects the relativistic accounts of rationality that are often associated with pragmatism. In the tradition of Gadamer, Simpson firmly establishes hermeneutics as a resource for both philosophy and the social sciences. He shows its utility for unpacking intractable issues in the philosophy of science, multiculturalism, social epistemology, and racial and social justice in the global arena. Simpson addresses fraught questions such as why recent claims that “race” has a biological basis lack grounding, whether female genital excision can be critically addressed without invidious ethnocentrism, and how to lay the foundations for meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and reparative justice. This book reveals how hermeneutics can be a worthy partner with critical theory in achieving emancipatory aims.
Hermeneutics and Music Criticism forges new perspectives on aesthetics, politics and contemporary interpretive strategies. By advancing new insights into the roles judgment and imagination play both in our experiences of music and its critical interpretation, this book reevaluates our current understandings of music’s transformative power. The engagement with critical musicologists and philosophers, including Adorno, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, provides a nuanced analysis of the crucial issues affecting the theory and practice of music criticism. By challenging musical hermeneutics’ deployment as a means of deciphering social values and meanings, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism offers an answer to the long-standing question of how music’s expression of moods and feelings affects us and our relation to the world.
Providing a comprehensive engagement with the work of Hans-Herbert Kögler, this is the first volume to expand upon and critique his distinctive approach to critical theory: critical hermeneutics. In the current climate of crisis, the relevance and fruitfulness of Kögler's work has never been greater, as he fuses the philosophies of Michel Foucault, Hans Georg Gadamer, and his mentor, Jürgen Habermas, to respond to critical international issues surrounding politics, agency, and society. Working towards a truly non-ethno-centric and global conception of intercultural dialogue, an essential aspect of Kögler's critical hermeneutics is his account of selfhood as reflexive: socially situated, embodied, and linguistically articulated, permeated by power, but yet critical and creative. Leading international scholars, representing a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, build upon Kögler's approach in this volume and explore the methodological, theoretical, and applicative scope of critical hermeneutics beyond the Frankfurt School. In doing so, they address some of the most pressing issues facing global society today, from multilingual education to the urgent need for interreligious and intercultural understanding. Closing with a response from Kögler himself, Hans-Herbert Kögler's Critical Hermeneutics also offers an exclusive account of the philosopher's contemporary re-appraisal of the core tenets of critical hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics can loosely be defined as the theory or philosophy of the interpretation of menaing. It is a central topic in the philosophy of the social sciences, the philosophy of art and language and in literary criticism. This book, first published in 1980, gives a detailed overview and analysis of the main strands of contemporary hermeneutical thought. It includes a number of readings in order to give the reader a first-hand acquaintance with the subjects and the debates within it.
This book presents proponents of five approaches to biblical hermeneutics and allows them to respond to each other. The five approaches are the historical-critical/grammatical (Craig Blomberg), redemptive-historical (Richard Gaffin), literary/postmodern (Scott Spencer), canonical (Robert Wall) and philosophical/theological (Merold Westphal) views.
Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur were two of the most important hermeneutical philosophers of the twentieth century. Gadamer single-handedly revived hermeneutics as a philosophical field with his many essays and his masterpiece, Truth and Method. Ricoeur famously mediated the Gadamer-Habermas debate and advanced his own hermeneutical philosophy through a number of books addressing social theory, religion, psychoanalysis and political philosophy. This book brings Gadamer and Ricoeur into a hermeneutical conversation with each other through some of their most important commentators. Twelve leading scholars deliver contemporary assessments of the history and promise of hermeneutical philosophy, providing focused discussion on the work of these two key hermeneutical thinkers. The book shows how the horizons of their thought at once support and question each other and how, in many ways, the work of these two pioneering philosophers defines the issues and agendas for the new century.
New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism provides readers of the Bible with an important tool for understanding the Scriptures. Based on the theory and practice of Greek rhetoric in the New Testament, George Kennedy's approach acknowledges that New Testament writers wrote to persuade an audience of the truth of their messages. These writers employed rhetorical conventions that were widely known and imitated in the society of the times. Sometimes confirming but often challenging common interpretations of texts, this is the first systematic study of the rhetorical composition of the New Testament. As a complement to form criticism, historical criticism, and other methods of biblical analysis, rhetorical criticism focuses on the text as we have it and seeks to discover the basis of its powerful appeal and the intent of its authors. Kennedy shows that biblical writers employed both "external" modes of persuasion, such as scriptural authority, the evidence of miracles, and the testimony of witnesses, and "internal" methods, such as ethos (authority and character of the speaker), pathos (emotional appeal to the audience), and logos (deductive and inductive argument in the text). In the opening chapter Kennedy presents a survey of how rhetoric was taught in the New Testament period and outlines a rigorous method of rhetorical criticism that involves a series of steps. He provides in succeeding chapters examples of rhetorical analysis, looking closely at the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus' farewell to the disciples in John's Gospel, the distinctive rhetoric of Jesus, the speeches in Acts, and the approach of Saint Paul in Second Corinthians, Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans.