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Windows Into The Unseen The Power Of Metaphor As Revealed By Paul Ricoeur And Moses Maimonides, Claire E. Molk
Windows Into The Unseen The Power Of Metaphor As Revealed By Paul Ricoeur And Moses Maimonides, Claire E. Molk
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Ambiguous language haunts countless fields of human inquiry. The solution to its confounding nature has repeatedly been to reduce language to its face-value, launching an endless search for the right meaning. This paper aims to examine two thinkers who reveal language to be a more complicated matter. Paul Ricoeur and Moses Maimonides demonstrate the importance of language’s complexity through close examinations of metaphor. While we find different understandings of metaphor, reflecting different metaphysics within each author’s study, both Ricoeur and Maimonides contribute to the notion that language’s complexity is not to be eliminated through literal readings, but engaged to open …
Explaining The Obvious: Privileged Hermeneutics And The Irony Of Explicitly Literal Interpretation, Joshua Alkire
Explaining The Obvious: Privileged Hermeneutics And The Irony Of Explicitly Literal Interpretation, Joshua Alkire
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The purpose of this thesis is to examine why so many uses of the word literal (whether taken from everyday contemporary speech or the works of well-respected ancient writers) seem at odds with the word’s theoretical definition and to explore the implications of this disparity for those who privilege a literal interpretation of Scripture. The examples will show that the meaning of literal was not altered at a particular point in time, nor is it altered on an ongoing basis by a small subset of particularly idiosyncratic individuals. Rather, the word is predisposed to behave strangely the moment it is …