Global Metaphors For Wisdom: Philosophy As A Species Of The Genus Hao-Xue, Joshua Mason

Comparative Philosophy

Many philosophers have refused to recognize Chinese traditions as genuinely philosophical. The conceptual foundations of these exclusionary efforts appear in Aristotle’s dividing philosophy from rhetoric, then associating philosophy with truth, and rhetoric with metaphor. The Chinese have frequently been defined as metaphorical thinkers, in contrast with the logical, scientific, or literal pursuits of Occidental traditions. Because metaphor is classed with rhetoric, and Chinese was associated with metaphor, critics had a way to say that the Chinese weren’t participating in philia-sophia as rational inquiry into truth. I draw on two strands of 20^th century philosophy to move us beyond this …

Alyosha The Christian Hermeneut, Eddie Li

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Presentation Abstract: Alyosha as the Christian Hermeneut

This presentation is adapted from my essay Alyosha as the Christian Hermeneut, written under the supervision of Dr. Paul Contino. In the essay, I gave an analysis of the character Alyosha in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and Dr. Contino’s book on Incarnational Realism. I discussed how Alyosha adapts from an inexperienced Christian disciple to a mature interpreter capable of conducting the hermeneutical fusion of horizons with different horizons. Within this capability, Alyosha develops his unique Christian horizon, enabling him to understand and reconcile the …

Strong Linguistic Relativity: A Continental Sense Of Language And Being, Ava Totah, Brian Treanor

Honors Thesis

The theory of linguistic relativity can be divided into two hypotheses: the strong argument and the weak argument. The strong argument, often called linguistic determinism, posits that one’s native language determines one’s thought in an inescapable manner. The so-called “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” demonstrates this, though many modern linguists now believe this principle – and linguistic determinism in general – to be implausible. The weak argument for linguistic relativity states that one’s native language merely influences their worldview, such that it struggles to maintain a connection that is more than trivial. In this work, I seek a “third option” that is both …

Applying Gadamer: An Evaluation Of Interpretations Of The Confucian Analects By Different Schools Under The Light Of Gadamerian Hermeneutics, Yifeng Xu

Senior Independent Study Theses

This thesis attempts to analyse and evaluate several interpretations of the Confucian Analects under the light of Gadamerian hermeneutics. In chapter 1, I explicate Gadamerian hermeneutics and analyse Gadamer’s hermeneutical view. In chapter 2, I introduce a challenge to Gadamer’s theory regarding the problem of objectivity, give Gadamer a limited defence, and then reconstruct Gadamerian hermeneutics in order to answer the challenge. Chapter 3 deals with some further concerns about the application of Gadamerian hermeneutics in terms of evaluating interpretations. Chapter 4 and 5 are spent on analysing two groups of interpretations of the Confucian Analects as well as the …

The Normative Architecture Of Reality: Towards An Object-Oriented Ethics, Justin L. Harmon

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The fact-value distinction has structured and still structures ongoing debates in metaethics, and all of the major positions in the field (expressivism, cognitivist realism, and moral error theory) subscribe to it. In contrast, I claim that the fact-value distinction is a contingent product of our intellectual history and a prime object for questioning. The most forceful reason for rejecting the distinction is that it presupposes a problematic understanding of the subject-object divide whereby one tends to view humans as the sole source of normativity in the world. My dissertation aims to disclose the background against which human ethical praxis is …

Language, Truth, And Rhetoric, Collin Pointon

e-Research: A Journal of Undergraduate Work

The words of Martin Heidegger are no example of the lowest form of wit. His sentence is meant to be interpreted in two important ways that utilize different meanings of the word "truth." Our common understanding of the word truth is not something innate but a product of history and culture that stretches back through the Romans to the ancient Greeks. Alētheia in ancient Greek was translated to veritas in Latin. The translation included an interpretation--as all translations do (which is why translation is rhetorical in nature)--of alētheia as a Platonic entity. Alētheia was interpreted as something transcendent; something that …

Heidegger And Our Twenty-Fi Rst Century Experience Of Ge-Stell Theodore Kisiel, Theodor Kisiel

Research Resources

I propose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell, Heidegger’s word for the essence of modern technology, from its Greek and Latin roots as “synthetic com-posit[ion]ing,” which presciently portends our twenty-first century experience of the internetted WorldWideWeb with its virtual infinity of websites in cyberspace, Global Positioning Systems, interlocking air traffic control grids, world-embracing weather maps, the 24-7 world news coverage of cable TV-networks like CNN, etc., etc.—all of which are structured by the complex programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0). The sharp …

"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" Or Nietzsche And Hermeneutics In Gadamer, Lyotard, And Vattimo, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Apart from reading Nietzsche's words on his characterization as an educator in suspicion with some suspicion, what does Nietzsche offer hermeneutics? This essay takes up this question by talking about the politics of interpretation, hermeneutics, and genealogy. In the process, we can address Lyotard's enthusiastic fealty to technology and offer yet once more requiem for the postmodern, understood here through (and hence contra) Lyotard as the simulacrum of communication that is the internet.

Imagination, Religious Practice, And World Transformations: Sophia, Heidegger, And Jacob Bohme's The Way To Christ, Mark Allen Peckler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is offered as a work of original scholarship in the field of Religion and Psychological Studies (RPS). Through its hermeneutic preservation of Jacob Böhme's The Way to Christ in "conversation" with selected works of Martin Heidegger, I retrieve the question of imagination's relation to religious practice, attending to potentials for world transformations disclosed through this relationship, in order to develop a new hermeneutic option for the RPS field concerning this important question. This new hermeneutic option is developed in such a way as to ensure a subversive compatibility with psychoanalytic hermeneutics—our field's koiné—while opening to certain radical …

Vico’S New Science Of Interpretation: Beyond Philosophical Hermeneutics And The Hermeneutics Of Suspicion, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article situates Vico's hermeneutical science of history between a hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur, Habermas, Freud) and a redemptive hermeneutics (Gadamer, Benjamin). It discusses Vico's early writings and his ambivalent trajectory from Cartesian rationalism to counter-enlightenment historicist and critic of natural law reasoning. The complexity of Vico's thinking belies some of the popular treatments of his thought developed by Isaiah Berlin and others.

Continental Philosophy In Britain And America, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Continental, or as it is sometimes called, contemporary European philosophy represents a range of approaches to academic philosophy distinguished from the analytic modality dominating professional or institutional philosophy in the United Kingdom and in the United States, as in Australia, Canada, and Ireland. Where the analytic tradition itself may be said to trace its own roots to Europe, e.g., positivism may be traced to France and its originator August Comte, and logical empiricism to Germany and to Austria and the writings of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle, continental philosophy expresses an ideological tradition …

Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary

Research Resources

In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that

between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because …

The Question Of Hermeneutics, Timothy Stapleton

Research Resources

No abstract provided.

The Native, General Background Of Ignatius Of Loyola, Antonio T De Nicolas

Research Resources

First chaper of de Nicolas:

Powers of Imagining: Ignatius of Loyola : A Philosophical Hermeneutic of Imagining Through the Collected Works of Ignatius De Loyola With a Translation of These Works (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986)