Hermeneutics Religion And Ethics

In the years shortly before and after the publication of his classic Truth and Method (1960), the eminent German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer returned often to questions surrounding religion and ethics. In this selection of writings from Gesammelte Werke that are here translated into English for the first time, Gadamer probes deeply into the hermeneutic significance of these subjects.

In the years shortly before and after the publication of his classic Truth and Method (1960), the eminent German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer returned often to questions surrounding religion and ethics. In this selection of writings from Gesammelte Werke that are here translated into English for the first time, Gadamer probes deeply into the hermeneutic significance of these subjects. Gadamer raises issues of importance to ethicists and theologians as well as students of language and literature. In such outstanding essays as "Kant and the Question of God," "Thinking as Redemption: Plotinus between Plato and Augustine," and "Friendship and Self-Knowledge: Reflections on the Role of Friendship in Greek Ethics," Gadamer discusses the nature of moral behavior, ethics as a form of knowing, and the hermeneutic task of mediating ethos and philosophical ethics with one another.

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This book is a philosophical study of the Freudian psychoanalysis of religion from a hermeneutical perspective. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, the twentieth-century French phenomenologist, the author offers a sustained and rigorous reflection on Freud's critique of Christian religion and raises the pertinent question of whether psychoanalysis should be conceived of as a form of hermeneutics. To this end, the author details the often acrimonious debates and discussions that took place between Ricoeur and Jacques Lacan, as well as drawing on the work of Slavoj Zizek on this intriguing subject, with Lacan and Zizek resisting any attempt to interpret psychoanalysis along the lines of hermeneutics. Having brought Ricoeur's reflections to bear on both Freud and Lacan, the author next engages with the Thomist metaphysical tradition. He deals especially with Aquinas' famous five arguments for the existence of God, the relevance of which becomes apparent in the last chapter when the author sheds a Lacanian light on Thomas' mystical experience. The author argues that the 'real' God - the God of Thomas' experience - pertains to the (Lacanian) order of the Real. The book concludes with a précis on the beauty of belief.

In Ricoeur on Moral Religion, James Carter argues that Paul Ricoeur's later philosophical writings provide a highly instructive interpretive key with which to assess his philosophical project as a whole. This first systematic study of the 'later Ricoeur' offers a critical yet sympathetic reconstruction of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of ethical life, which demonstrates his significant contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion and moral philosophy. What emerges is a clear and distinctive moral religion that binds humans together universally on the basis of the life they share as capable beings. Carter also uncovers a hitherto unforeseen thread in Ricoeur's writings concerning ethical life, pulled through his own readings of Spinoza, Aristotle, and Kant. Ricoeur's hermeneutics is structured by a Kantian architectonic informed at different levels by these three philosophers, who ground a rich, holistic, and ultimately rationalist account of ethical life and religion that resists the trappings of both positivism and postmodernism.

The Meanings We Choose is an engagement with responsible bible reading-Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and New Testament texts-for the past as well as for the present and future. Its stated perspectives are multi-denominational Christian but the implications of such readings go far beyond a specific confessional framework. In the present political climate the aware, responsible "personal" is meaningful for any community, confessedly religious as well as otherwise. While the articles collected in this volume, broadly speaking, can and perhaps should be compartmentalized as ideological criticism, their significance for reading ideologies "different" from their own is more than considerable.

The Ethics of Time utilizes the resources of phenomenology and hermeneutics to explore this under-charted field of philosophical inquiry. Its rigorous analyses of such phenomena as waiting, memory, and the body are carried out phenomenologically, as it engages in a hermeneutical reading of such classical texts as Augustine's Confessions and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, among others. The Ethics of Time takes seriously phenomenology's claim of a consciousness both constituting time and being constituted by time. This claim has some important implications for the “ethical” self or, rather, for the ways in which such a self informed by time, might come to understand anew the problems of imperfection and ethical goodness. Even though a strictly philosophical endeavour, this book engages knowledgeably and deftly with subjects across literature, theology and the arts and will be of interest to scholars throughout these disciplines.