The Linguistic Turn In Hermeneutic Philosophy

Cristina Lafont draws upon Hilary Putnam's work in particular to criticize the linguistic idealism and relativism of the German tradition, which she traces back to the assumption that meaning determines reference.

In this book, internationally recognized scholars in philosophical hermeneutics discuss various aspects of language and linguisticality. The translations of Hans-Georg Gadamer's two recent essays provoke a preliminary discussion on the philosopher's polemic claim in Truth and Method--"Being that can be understood is language." Topics addressed by the contributors include the relationship of rituals to tradition and the immemorial; the unity of the word; conversation; translation and conceptuality; and the interrelationship between the art of writing and linguisticality. This work is of critical importance to anyone interested in Gadamer's claims regarding the boundaries of language, the transition from the prelinguistic to linguistic realms, and the role of rituals in this transition.

Contemporary philosopher—analytic as well as continental tend to feel uneasy about Ernst Tugendhat, who, though he positions himself in the analytic field, poses questions in the Heideggerian style. Tugendhat was one of Martin Heidegger's last pupils and his least obedient, pursuing a new and controversial critical technique. Tugendhat took Heidegger's destruction of Being as presence and developed it in analytic philosophy, more specifically in semantics. Only formal semantics, according to Tugendhat, could answer the questions left open by Heidegger. Yet in doing this, Tugendhat discovered the latent "hermeneutic nature of analytic philosophy" its post-metaphysical dimension—in which "there are no facts, but only true propositions." What Tugendhat seeks to answer is this: What is the meaning of thought following the linguistic turn? Because of the rift between analytic and continental philosophers, very few studies have been written on Tugendhat, and he has been omitted altogether from several histories of philosophy. Now that these two schools have begun to reconcile, Tugendhat has become an example of a philosopher who, in the words of Richard Rorty, "built bridges between continents and between centuries." Tugendhat is known more for his philosophical turn than for his phenomenological studies or for his position within analytic philosophy, and this creates some confusion regarding his philosophical propensities. Is Tugendhat analytic or continental? Is he a follower of Wittgenstein or Heidegger? Does he belong in the culture of analysis or in that of tradition? Santiago Zabala presents Tugendhat as an example of merged horizons, promoting a philosophical historiography that is concerned more with dialogue and less with classification. In doing so, he places us squarely within a dialogic culture of the future and proves that any such labels impoverish philosophical research.

Material Hermeneutics explores the ways in which new imaging technologies and scientific instruments have changed our notions about ancient history. From the first lunar calendar to the black hole image, and from an ancient mummy in the Italian Alps to the irrigated valleys of Mesopotamia, this book demonstrates how revolutions in science have taught us far more than we imagined. Written by a leading philosopher of technology and utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, this book has implications for many fields, including philosophy, history, science, and technology. It will appeal to scholars and students of the humanities, as well as anthropologists and archaeologists.

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.

The Language of Hermeneutics probes the most intense points of proximity between the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the poetizing thinking of his great teacher, Martin Heidegger -- points of proximity which nevertheless show as clearly as possible the critical points of departure that set these two thinkers on separate parallel thought paths. By focusing exclusively on these two thinkers' respective readings of Plato, Aristotle, Holderlin, and Hegel, this book shows how Gadamer effectively deconstructs his mentor's architectonic of the history of being and retrieves from it a new mode of philosophizing that recognizes and embraces the fundamentally ironic structure of the world and boldy risks an interpretation of it.

Günter Figal has long been recognized as one of the most insightful interpreters working in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics and its leading themes concerned with ancient Greek thought, art, language, and history. With this book, Figal presses this tradition of philosophical hermeneutics in new directions. In his effort to forge philosophical hermeneutics into a hermeneutical philosophy, Figal develops an original critique of the objectification of the world that emerges in modernity as the first stage in his systematic treatment of the elements of experience hermeneutically understood. Breaking through the prejudices of modernity, but not sacrificing the importance and challenge of the objective world that confronts us and is in need of interpretation, Figal reorients how it is that philosophy should take up some of its most longstanding and stubborn questions. World, object, space, language, freedom, time, and life are refreshed as philosophical notions here since they are each regarded as elements of human life engaged in the task assigned to each of us—the task of understanding ourselves and our world.

This book is a major contribution to the understanding of Heidegger and a rare attempt to bridge the schism between traditions of analytic and Continental philosophy. Cristina Lafont applies the core methodology of analytic philosophy, language analysis, to Heidegger's work providing both a clearer exegesis and a powerful critique of his approach to the subject of language. In Part One, she explores the Heideggerean conception of language in depth. In Part Two, she draws on recent work from theorists of direct reference (Putnam, Donnellan and Kripke inter alia) to reveal the limitations of Heidegger's views and to show how language shapes our understanding of the world without making learning impossible. The book first appeared in German but has been substantially revised for the English edition.