Philosophy Today

This paper examines the question concerning the equality vs. inequality of death from a metaphysical and existential, rather than political or socio-economic, point of view. Hence, the paper is a contribution to the philosophy of death, dying, and mortality. It is argued that some philosophical accounts of death that are otherwise opposed to each other (e.g., Epicureanism and the “privation view” made famous by Thomas Nagel) are symmetrical regarding this fundamental issue. A recent attempt to resolve the threat death poses to the “importance of goodness” by Mark Johnston is critically explored. The horizon of guilt will thereby be opened toward the end of the paper.

This paper takes the theme of Heidegger’s phrase “a productive dialogue with Marxism” from the “Letter on Humanism” and examines what Heidegger could have meant by it by referring to a number of his works and commentary in other places, and the backdrop of European, Western, and global history in the twentieth century. The paper touches on Heidegger’s relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, Kostas Axelos and Jean Beaufret. It looks at a key section of the 1969 television interview Heidegger conducted with Richard Wisser, when he discussed the eleventh of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. The paper examines Heidegger’s interpretation of the “Letter” and of Being and Time in view of what he meant by “the language of metaphysics,” as well as his central interpretation of Marx at Zähringen in 1973, and his understanding of “production” in relation to his critique of technology. The paper concludes by showing how Heidegger understands Marx and Marxism to have made possible a historical dialogue at the “end of metaphysics” which opens the way to what Heidegger sees as the Abendland, that is, what befalls us through the new beginning that history offers to thinking.

Recently much attention has been paid to the concept of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and its role in his theories of language, art, history, and truth. However, most authors have considered expression only as a mode of language. This paper attempts to show that a full understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expression, and in particular the problem of how new meanings can be created out of existing language, is possible only by considering the role of emotional gesture in expression. It does so by interpreting Merleau-Ponty’s writings on emotion and expression through a phenomenology of a particular emotion, specifically joy.

A simplistic image of twentieth century French philosophy sees Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 as the line that divides two irreconcilable moments in its history: existentialism and phenomenology, on the one hand, and structuralism on the other. The structuralist generation claimed to recapture the dimension of objectivity and impersonality, which the previous generation was supposedly incapable of. As a matter of fact, in 1962, Derrida’s edition of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry was taken to be a turning point that announced the structuralist revolution by introducing a reflection on the historicity and the materiality of impersonal idealities. And yet, the 1998 publication of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from his Collège de France lecture course on the same topic make manifest that he was already taking phenomenology in another direction. His 1959 reading of The Origin of Geometry shows how unexpectedly close the early Derrida is to the late Merleau-Ponty. By identifying the tension between archaeology and teleology as the basic problem of Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida each disclose the fundamental importance of history and of writing. Comparing the two readings in their specific context not only brings about a more complex picture of the intellectual debates of the time, but also shows how, with Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of The Origin of Geometry, Derrida’s “différance” predates itself and receives another genealogy.

“Further Considerations of Alienation” attempts to expand upon an earlier essay entitled “Merleau-Ponty and a Reconsideration of Alienation.” From the point of view of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, this new essay considers modernist rationality and the postmodernist free play of language as forms of alienation. The essay attempts to show that Merleau-Ponty joins the company of Marx, Lukács, Habermas and Heidegger in order to make this case.

The general aim of this paper is to reach a better understanding of the dynamic process that gives rise to a self and its conscious activity. In order to meet this overall goal, I will analyse in detail the three main stages of the creative process, taking Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the painter’s experience provided in Eye and Mind as my starting point. My argument will unfold in three main stages. First, I will focus on his notion of flesh, in order to explore the experience of bodily feeling (le sentir) that precedes the very emergence of a self in the midst of perceptual life. Second, I will analyze descriptions of the circle of artistic creation, provided by famous painters—such as Paul Klee and Paul Cézanne—in order to reach a better understanding of the dynamic process through which bodily selfhood occurs and brings about consciousness in a continuous intertwining with the world that constantly nurtures the performance of its expressive gesture. Third, I will return to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, this time grasped in its practical form as a moving and expressive body, in order to achieve a more radical formulation of this same process. In conclusion, this approach should show that the arousal of consciousness, this shining eye allowing things hidden in the shadow to appear, is in some way conditional upon an expressive gesture which prolongs vision and leads back to it.

This essay offers a review of the basic argument and a critique of some of the central claims of Johanna Oksala’s Foucault, Politics, and Violence.

In Foucault, Politics, and Violence, Johanna Oksala argues that Foucault offers us a “political ontology” that might be used to free us from rigid adherence to specific political concepts and rationalities (in particular, those that the link politics and violence). I raise questions concerning her method, the eliminability of violence, and what a genealogical critique can and cannot do.

I respond to questions and criticisms of my book from Jana Sawicki and Kevin Thompson. I address Jana Sawicki’s questions about my method and the limits of a Foucaudian critique. In response to Kevin Thompson’s questions, I explicate my understanding of the governmentalization of violence, immanent critique, and political spirituality.

This plenary address to the 2013 annual meeting of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics is intended to shift the discussion beyond the study of individual figures like Gadamer and Ricoeur. Beyond the distinction between ontological and epistemological approaches to hermeneutics, and even that between regional and general hermeneutics, it seeks to pose three areas needing further inves­tigation. At the level of presuppositions and assumptions, more needs to be said about how we can say “we understand”; at the level of practice, there is the question of how one evaluates not just competing interpretations but any interpretation; and at a more basic level constitutive of hermeneutic philosophy, the question of reflexivity—that I/we understand that I/we understand—remains to be explored.

The central question of the essay is: How is a hermeneutic ethic possible, given that its conditions of possibility may seem in crisis if explicit criteria for normative evaluation are rejected and the interpreting subject seems fully integrated into a process of open-ended contextual understanding. The emerging possibility of a situated ethos of dialogue, however, is challenged by the administrative and instrumental destruction of tradition. In response, a careful reinterpretation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim that interpretation is per se ethical provides us with the normative ideal of dialogical openness. Yet Gadamer’s broad-brushed rejection of social-scientific research is replaced by the subtle proposal for a reflective co-operation between dialogical understanding and sociological thought. Now the social sciences and social theory either reconstruct empirical sources of the ethos of dialogue, or they deconstruct (via empirical analysis) the forces of discursive and social power that undermine the realization of our ethical potential.

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has come under criticism for his treatment of the other. Generally these critiques charge that Gadamer fails to give the other due consideration and instead collapses her into a non-challenging conversational partner of the interpreter or listener. Robert Bernasconi, in his “‘You Don’t Know What I’m Talking About’: Alterity and the Hermeneutic Ideal” and “‘Y’All Don’t Hear Me Now’: On Lorenzo Simpson’s The Unfinished Project,” charges that the hermeneutic model of conversation is unable to respect the alterity of an other that wishes to issue a truly radical critique of the conversation. Against this characterization I contend that Gadamer’s account of the other does indeed provide for an other that is neither assimilated nor prevented from announcing a thorough challenge, so long as the comparison that Gadamer draws between the hermeneutic task of reading a text and the relationship between the listener and the other is taken to its full extent.

The article focuses on the in-between of the voluntary and the involuntary in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self. From the triad of passivity (the flesh, conscience and the other), through the intentional act, the author analyzes the empty place in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of voluntary actions that can appear to be involuntary, such as actions motivated by passions but which nonetheless remain in the self’s responsibility and in the domain of forgiveness. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, character belongs to the realm of sameness and the absolute involuntary. The author thus emphasizes the possible ways in which we may work on our character and the problems of equating narrative identity with the self and identity. The story of our life cannot be reduced to our lived story nor to our narrative identity, since it also involves involuntary events that do not necessarily say much about who the self is.

This essay is an assessment of the crucial differences between the herme­neutics of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-George Gadamer in the wake of Ricoeur’s final works and death. I take as a jumping-off point Jean Grondin’s recent exposition of seven cardinal differences between the two perspectives. I aggregate these seven differences along two axes which cross on the relation of hermeneutics to φρόνησις, and I argue that each axis points to a major flaw in the respective hermeneutics of each thinker. Finally I reflect on the implications of these defects for hermeneutics going forward.

In Truth and Method Gadamer makes the curious claim that “we cannot have experiences without asking questions.” At first blush, at least, this appears to be patently false. We have experiences all the time without asking ourselves anything. In this paper I offer an alternative reading of Gadamer’s claim that does not fall prey to this objection, one that centers around his analysis of the question as a structure that can be implicitly present in experience even when no explicit questioning occurs. Unpacking this sheds interesting light on a central, but often overlooked, aspect of Gadamer’s hermeneutics: his account of intentionality. According to this account, questioning enjoys a certain ‘priority’ over other types of intentional activity. Building on Gadamer’s largely unsystematic comments, I offer an analysis of what this priority consists in and an argument for Gadamer’s claim that it obtains.

The history of philosophical hermeneutics is one of expanding scope—moving from the interpretation of religious texts, to all texts, to understanding in the human sciences, to all understanding. As its scope expands it intersects with a wider range of philosophical traditions; only by making these intersections explicit can the key themes of philosophical hermeneutics come forward. I consider two central hermeneutic claims—that nature can be thought of as a text and that insights drawn from understanding texts illuminate all understanding. These ideas have roots in the Liber Naturae, especially in the writings of Hugh of St. Victor and of Robert Boyle. Understanding how they each see nature as a text enables us to clarify how Hans-Georg Gadamer must see it and draws our attention to his neglected phenomenology of reading.

This article is an interpretive analysis of James Risser’s book The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics. I focus on the key elements of Risser’s notion of community and what I call his hermeneutics of the strange and foreign. The article pays particular attention to some of the most important themes in Risser’s book: aesthetics and the flash of beauty; language and the poetic word; the transmission of tradition; the movement of Ruinanz and the circulation of life; weaving. Overall, I attempt to trace the nexus of Plato-Gadamer-Risser in Risser’s text in order to trace the emergence of a contemporary hermeneutics after Gadamer that is developed by Risser in this text.

The purpose of this piece is to examine the contribution made to the philosophical study of hermeneutics by James Risser’s recently published book, The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics. The author argues that Risser’s emphasis on the relation of understanding to factical life places him among contemporaries, such as Donatella di Cesare and Günter Figal, who seek to advance hermeneutics beyond the context of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach. The author argues that Risser’s hermeneutics is distinguished by his concern for the radical finitude at stake in the experience of tradition, language, and beauty. In view of this, the author broaches questions that bring into focus the proximity between Risser’s hermeneutics and Jacques Derrida’s project of deconstruction.

This article is a response to comments made by Walter Brogan and Theodore George about my book, The Life of Understanding.