Revised thesis (Ph. D.) - University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, 2002.

The inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics refers to the meaning that exceeds anything explicitly said. This explanation has been subsumed within metaphysical and theological parameters of interpretation with little regard for the implication of Gadamer’s turn to the living language for understanding the inner word. Through examining his phenomenology of the inner word, The Inner Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics reveals its musical (rhythmic and tonal) dimensions and how they function to harmonize disparate orientations in the middle voice, above all for Gadamer, those that underlie modes of cognition in both the humanities and the sciences—a visual and auditory ethos. However, understood as constituting the music of language discernible in the middle voice, the inner word is also suppressed or forgotten by the technological extension of sight—that is, print—and thus requires a turn of the inner ear or auditory disposition. Andrew Fuyarchuk assesses theories of language in evolutionary and cognitive science in light of Gadamer’s insights into the nature of thought, and he employs them to account for a dimension of language that is inscribed in the lingual minds of our species. When recalled by the inner ear, this dimension enables us to think such opposites together as we find in the humanities and sciences together. This thinking together is expressed in a double account of an object of inquiry, such as the one Fuyarchuk puts forward about the inner word in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

Gadamer's Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation covers the nature of dialogue and understanding in Hans-Georg Gadamer's lingually oriented hermeneutics and its relevance for contemporary philosophy. This timely collection of essays stresses the fundamental significance of the other for a further development of Heidegger's analytics of Dasein. By recognizing the priority of the other over oneself, Gadamerian hermeneutics founds a culture of dialogue sorely needed in our multi-cultural globalized community. The essays solicited for this volume are presented in three thematic blocks: "Hermeneutic Conversation," "Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, and Transcendence," "Hermeneutic Ethics, Education, and Politics." The volume proposes a dynamic understanding of hermeneutics as putting into practice the art of conversation.

In this multi-faceted volume, Christian and other religiously committed theorists find themselves at an uneasy point in history -- between premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity -- where disciplines and methods, cultural and linguistic traditions, and religious commitments tangle and cross. Here, leading theorists explore the state of the art of the contemporary hermeneutical terrain. As they address the work of Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida, the essays collected in this wide-ranging work engage key themes in philosophical hermeneutics, hermeneutics and religion, hermeneutics and the other arts, hermeneutics and literature, and hermeneutics and ethics. Readers will find lively exchanges and reflections that meet the intellectual and philosophical challenges posed by hermeneutics at the crossroads. Contributors are Bruce Ellis Benson, Christina Bieber Lake, John D. Caputo, Eduardo J. Echeverria, Benne Faber, Norman Lillegard, Roger Lundin, Brian McCrea, James K. A. Smith, Michael VanderWeele, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.

One exciting area of study is Paul's use of the Old Testament. The apostle routinely appeals to Scripture to support his arguments and to persuade his readers. One gets the impression that Paul has a high respect for Scripture and that his knowledge of it is broad and comprehensive. And yet, there is something enigmatic about his use of the Old Testament at the same time--something elusive and even puzzling. His interpretations can appear strained, sometimes going beyond the text's original context. Is Paul a poor reader of Scripture? Is there genuine tension between Paul's interpretations and the original context of his quotations? In this riveting study, Matthew L. Halsted takes readers through Romans to explore these and related questions. In the end, he argues that such tension does exist and that the solution is not to ignore it or view it as a liability, but rather to preserve it by adopting a hermeneutic that can sufficiently account for it as an integral element for each and every act of interpretation. Following the insights of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), Halsted describes Paul's use of Scripture as dialogical re-authoring--a term that captures the dynamic relationship between the apostle and the Jewish texts that were so important to him.

Offers an interdisciplinary investigation of affectivity in various forms of life. E-Co-Affectivity is a philosophical investigation of affectivity in various forms of life: photosynthesis and growth in plants, touch and trauma in bird feathers, the ontogenesis of human life through the placenta, the bare interface of human skin, and the porous materiality of soil. Combining biology, phenomenology, Ancient Greek thought, new materialisms, environmental philosophy, and affect studies, Marjolein Oele thinks through the concrete, living places that show the receptive, responsive power of living beings to be affected and to affect. She focuses on these localized interfaces to explain how affectivity emerges in places that are always evolving, creative, porous, and fluid. Every interface is material, but is also “more” than its current materiality in cocreating place, time, and being. After extensively describing the effects of the milieu and community within which each example of affectivity takes place, in the final chapter Oele adds a prescriptive, ethical lens that formulates a new epoch beyond the Anthropocene, one that is sensitive to the larger ecological, communal concerns at stake. “This is a very welcome contribution to environmental philosophy. The strikingly original thesis is evident in the book’s title: what we call ‘ecology’ is a co-affectivity—the mutuality of affecting and being affected on the part of species, biological kingdoms, ecosystems, etc. Here, Marjolein Oele melds biology and ontology in new and creative ways, enriching both fields. Her book performs the very theme it explores: it stages a co-affective relation between philosophy and the life sciences.” — Michael Marder, author of Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life

These new essays explore central aspects of the ethical content of literature: character, its formation, and its role in moral discernment; poetic vision in the context of ethical understanding; self-identity and self-understanding; literature's role in moral growth and change; and the historical background of the ethical dimension of literature.

The topic of revelation is fundamental to any account of religious experience, playing a special role in the Judeo-Christian tradition where the texts of Scripture are regarded as revealed. Yet, any reflection on the revealed status of a given message or text requires interpretation. Paul Ricœur, one of the most important hermeneutic philosophers of the twentieth century, provides crucial insights on how such interpretation might proceed and what it might mean for texts to be revealed. Edited by Christina M. Gschwandtner, Paul Ricoeur, Philosophical Hermeneutics, and the Question of Revelation brings together major scholars of Ricœur’s work on the topic of revelation, showing both the role it already plays in his work and how his thinking might be taken further. Several contributors trace the development of his thought in regard to the concept of revelation. Others discuss the revelatory dimensions of Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the self, especially for such issues as identity, trauma, and forgiveness. Several contributions also place his work in conversation with that of other seminal thinkers on the topic of revelation, such as Karl Barth and Paul Tillich.

This book presents the first detailed treatment of Gadamer’s account of the nature of meaning. It argues both that this account is philosophically valuable in its own right and that understanding it sheds new light on his wider hermeneutical project. Whereas philosophers have typically thought of meanings as belonging to a special class of objects, the central claim of Gadamer’s view is that meanings are events. Instead of a pre-existing content that we must unearth through our interpretive efforts, for Gadamer the meaning of a text is what happens when we encounter it in the appropriate way. In events of meaning the world makes itself intelligibly present to us in a manner that is uniquely and irreducibly bound up with the concrete situation in which we find ourselves. When we recognize that Gadamer thinks of meaning in this way, we are better positioned to appreciate what his wider views amount to and how they hang together. Gadamer’s accounts of interpretive normativity, the aspectival character of understanding, and the nature of essences, for example, snap into more vivid relief when we see them as outgrowths of his underlying conception of meanings as events. The Event of Meaning in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics will especially appeal to researchers and advanced students working in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and the philosophy of language. More broadly it will be of interest to humanities teachers and researchers concerned with the question of how texts from distant cultures can be relevant to readers here and now.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), one of the towering figures of contemporary Continental philosophy, is best known for Truth and Method, where he elaborated the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics," a programmatic way to get to what we do when we engage in interpretation. Donatella Di Cesare highlights the central place of Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, in Gadamer's work, brings out differences between his thought and that of Heidegger, and connects him with discussions and debates in pragmatism. This is a sensitive and thoroughly readable philosophical portrait of one of the 20th century's most powerful thinkers.