This book offers a sustained scholarly analysis of Gadamer’s reflections on art and our experience of art. It examines fundamental themes in Gadamer’s hermeneutical aesthetics such as play, festival, symbol, contemporaneity, enactment, art’s performative ontology, and hermeneutical identity. The first two chapters focus on Gadamer’s critical appropriation and movement beyond Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. (Chapter 2 also includes a coda on Heidegger’s influence.) The final three chapters argue for the continued relevance of Gadamer’s hermeneutical aesthetics by bringing his claims into conversation with contemporary art and music, as well as the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of the Artworld and art praxis. The ethical and sociopolitical aspects of art- and music-making are given particular attention in chapters devoted to 20th-century African American artist Romare Bearden, Banksy’s street art, and a range of jazz expressions, from traditional jazz to the complex practice of free jazz. Gadamer’s Hermeneutical Aesthetics will appeal to researchers and advanced students working on Gadamer, philosophical hermeneutics, continental philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of contemporary art and music.

This volume explores Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics within a musical context. It features contributions from philosophers, musicians, educators, and musicologists from a variety of backgrounds, and sheds light on both the hermeneutic nature of music and the musicality of hermeneutics. Contributors to this volume hermeneutically think with music to uncover its fundamentally hermeneutic character, and by thinking with Gadamer in a musical context, explore ways in which hermeneutics may be understood to possess an inherent musicality. Gadamer's thought is taken up in a variety of musical contexts including improvisation, musical performance, classical music, jazz, and music criticism. This first volume to explore Gadamer's hermeneutics in a musical context breaks new ground by challenging musical concepts and by pushing Gadamer's thought in new directions. It appeals to philosophers engaged with Gadamer's thought (and philosophical hermeneutics more broadly), as well as philosophers of music, musicologists, and musicians interested in critically engaging with the practice of performing and listening to music.

This study provides an illuminating assessment of both the merits and the limitations of Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical thought. Kristin Gjesdal uses a close analysis and critical investigation of Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) to show that his engagement with Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher is integral to his conception of hermeneutics.

"A first-rate introduction to the field, accessible to scholars working from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Highly recommended... " -- Choice "... offers both broad theoretical considerations and applications to specific art forms, diverse methodological perspectives, and healthy debate among the contributors.... [an] outstanding volume."Â -- Philosophy and Literature "... this volume represents an eloquent and enlightened attempt to reconceptualize the field of aesthetic theory by encouraging its tendencies toward openness, self-reflexivity and plurality." -- Discourse & Society "All of the authors challenge the traditional notion of a pure and disinterested observer that does not allow for questions of race/ethnicity, class, sexual preference, or gender." -- Signs These essays examine the intellectual traditions of the philosophy of art and aesthetics. Containing essays by scholars and by the writer Marilyn French, the collection ranges from the history of aesthetic theory to a philosophical reflection on fashion. The contributions are unified by a sustained scrutiny of the nature of "feminist," "feminine," or "female" art, creativity, and interpretation.

This title, first published in 1991, opens with an account by Gadamer of his own life and work and their relation to the achievements of hermeneutics. Building upon the key theme of dialogue, Gadamer and Hermeneutics provides a series of essays, either linked Gadamer to other major contemporary philosophers or focusing on a given Gadamerian theme. This book will be of interest to students of literary theory.

This book brings into conversation Western and Orthodox hermeneutical schools: one represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer and his followers, while the other school is less focused around one person and yet displays common distinct features. The main question of the book is how we can mediate not only the content of understanding of who we are in relation to each other, to the world in which we live, and to God, but also comprehend the process of understanding across various historical periods. The strengths and weaknesses of both positions are presented, and it is shown how these two hermeneutical approaches can enrich each other. The book argues that preserving both positions, and indicating how they complement each other, helps show the limits of encountering the transcendent reality that can be testified to by human language without being reduced to it as such.

This book reassesses Gadamer’s hermeneutics by bringing it into a dialogue with John McDowell’s minimal empiricism. It employs the resources of McDowell’s minimal empiricism to address the transcendental and ontological presuppositions for objective experience and understanding, while retaining Gadamer’s emphasis on the historicity of understanding. By means of the dialogue with McDowell, the book develops a hermeneutical conception of objectivity and perceptual experience, which also entails reinterpretations of Gadamer’s notions of tradition, practical wisdom and meaning. The book explores the philosophical space beyond the analytic-Continental divide and demonstrates that hermeneutics is not limited to a reflection on understanding as it is practiced in the human sciences, but can be revived as a distinct and cogent philosophical approach with a transcendental and ontological dimension. Thaning's book is a richly detailed, well-argued and coherent presentation of a defensible, and potentially very important, philosophical position. It demonstrates an impressively deep understanding of the literature both from the phenomenological tradition and from the part of the analytical tradition, inspired by Wilfred Sellars, to which John McDowell belongs. Being a substantial philosophical achievement in its own right, the book raises far-reaching questions that will be of interest to a wide audience. Dr. Steven Crowell, Rice University, Houston (USA) Morten Thaning’s book is an important contribution to the discourse of philosophical hermeneutics. Thaning extensively discusses a topic, which recent debates have touched upon, but which up to now has not been the subject matter of concentrated scholarly work: the relation between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and McDowell’s empiricism. With Thaning’s interpretation Gadamer’ work can be read anew as concerning the problem of hermeneutical objectivity. Prof. Dr. Günter Figal, University of Freiburg (Germany)

Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer undoubtedly belong among the most important representatives of twentieth-century phenomenological hermeneutics, which represents, in turn, one of the major traditions within so-called continental philosophy. Respectively teacher and pupil, during their long and philosophically intense lives and careers Heidegger and Gadamer greatly contributed to the development of philosophical thought in our age, providing significant and often decisive contributions in various fields of philosophical inquiry. Their main works, Being and Time (1927) and Truth and Method (1960), respectively amount to the great “classics” of contemporary philosophy, both being extraordinarily influential books without which the history of twentieth- and also twenty-first century philosophy as we know it would not be conceivable. This book addresses a number of problems concerning aesthetics, metaphysics, language and philosophical anthropology, by focusing on Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s specific contributions in these fields, and by establishing fruitful and original comparisons between their views and those of other relevant thinkers of our time, such as Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty and John McDowell. The book adopts a comparative approach that portrays the complex philosophical problems and concepts at the core of this investigation from various points of view, thus broadening the philosophical horizon, generating a more comprehensive perspective, and underlining the compatibility of different philosophical views.

Essays on Aesthetic Genesis is a collection of essays written on Jeff Mitscherling’s work in realist phenomenology, Aesthetic Genesis: The Origin of Consciousness in the Intentional Being of Nature. The authors explicate, expand, contextualize and apply the concepts of intentional being, the “New Copernican Hypothesis” (a reversal of the fundamental tenet of phenomenology that all consciousness is intentional—intentionality, rather, gives rise to consciousness), the idea of intentional structures in nature, and the foundational concepts of Aesthetic Genesis as they appear in the work of Aristotle, Ingarden and Gadamer amongst others. This book takes as its focus Mitscherling’s comprehensive phenomenological analysis of embodiment, aesthetic experience, the interpretation of texts, moral behavior, and cognition, and exemplifies subsequent work in the field of realist phenomenology being conducted by an international collection of active scholars influenced by Aesthetic Genesis.

Hans-Georg Gadamer?s philosophical hermeneutics is especially relevant for law, which is grounded in the interpretation of authoritative texts from the past to resolve present-day disputes. In this collection, leading scholars consider the importance of Gadamer?s philosophy for ongoing disputes in legal theory. The work of prominent philosophers, including Fred Dallmayr, P. Christopher Smith and David Hoy, is joined with the work of leading legal theorists, such as William Eskridge, Lawrence Solum and Dennis Patterson, to provide an overview of the connections between law and Gadamer?s hermeneutical philosophy. Part I considers the relevance of Gadamer?s philosophy to longstanding disputes in legal theory such as the debate over originalism, the rule of law and proper modes of statutory and constitutional exegesis. Part II demonstrates Gadamer?s significance for legal theory by comparing his approach to the work of Nietzsche, Habermas and Dworkin.