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Abstract: This article aims to initiate the retrieval of Martin Heidegger’s thinking on myth. Beginning with a reflection on the dilemmas and precedents of approaching myth, this paper turns to an extensive review of Heidegger’s major, explicit treatments of mythology, the philosophy of myth, and mythos, ranging from the “mythical Dasein” of Being and Time and his review of Ernst Cassirer’s Mythical Thought to the implicated hermeneutics of mythos in Heidegger’s later ancient Greek lectures. On the basis of such a panoramic excavation with interspersed commentary, it is argued that Heidegger not only increasingly intimated a particular significance for the (re)consideration of myth, but ultimately approached myth in no less than the light of the disclosure of Being. Thus, this article lays the preliminary groundwork to serve further inquiry into myth per/in Heidegger.
Keywords: E. Cassirer, M. Heidegger, hermeneutics, myth, mythology
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 158; Downloads: 36
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Abstract: Despite their affinities in criticizing the Cartesian subject, contextualizing texts, and upholding dialogue as integral to interpretation, there are differences between the hermeneutic projects of Gadamer and Habermas. While Gadamer emphasizes real dialogue and continuity with tradition, Habermas highlights ideal communication and critical distance. With regard to the underexplored feminist intervention in their debate, it can be said that there are greater affinities between feminist thought and Gadamer arising from their commitment to historically situated thought. But the vantage position of tradition in Gadamer has generated its set of feminist apprehensions. The paper scrutinizes the consequences of intervening in the Gadamer–Habermas debate on the hermeneutics of tradition from a feminist perspective. Analyzing women characters in the Indian epic Mahabharata, it argues that the intersectionality between their gendered identity and varied social locations of class and caste leads to diverse feminist perspectives. In conclusion, the paper ponders over whether they are all equally critical and the extent to which they can be reconciled.
Keywords: hermeneutics, critique, feminism, dialogue, tradition, Gadamer, Habermas, Mahasweta Devi, Mahabharata
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 126; Downloads: 34
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Abstract: The huge tradition of philosophical readings of Hamlet is focused here on the theme of unknowing as crucial to Shakespeare’s epistemology. In contrast with the rising paradigm of experimental science, which Hamlet and fellow student Horatio bring into the play and which informs even the method employed for proving the guilt of the king, Hamlet dramatizes the advent of a new model of unknowing knowing by faith in “providence.” This constitutes a transformation of an older paradigm of prophetic knowledge by revelation, which comes to Hamlet in the form of the ghost of his father, a figure arousing doubt rather than certainty, and hesitation rather than action. With Hamlet’s blind trust in what he calls “providence,” the metaphysical order is no longer an object of knowledge, and yet it can ground belief and can still guide a kind of action that proves finally to be efficacious, even if tragic. Philosophical readings by Cutrofello, Critchley, Pascucci, Lukacher, and others are shown to line up with this non-objective kind of knowing, or more exactly unknowing, which nevertheless renews a kind of prophetic dimension of revelation in poetic language.
Keywords: prophecy, apophasis, modern thought, negative poetics
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 125; Downloads: 40
Full text (379,10 KB)

Abstract: The present article attempts to make explicit the existential dimension of a canonical literary text: Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. This work is chosen because it transmits a series of disturbing existential assertions; that is, it is used, in the present context, to investigate Gadamer’s thesis of the reader achieving a new self-understanding through the text. By taking both the author’s as well as the reader’s positions into account in the interpretation, the intention is furthermore to explore the dialogical situation that Gadamer highlights in the understanding process. In order to achieve this, focus is put on the notion of subjectivity in the context of Romanticism and Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy. The contribution is structured as follows: first, an overview is provided with respect to the development of the notion of subjectivity from Kant to Kierkegaard. After this, the existential aspects of Les Fleurs du mal are analyzed.
Keywords: hermeneutics, literature and philosophy, author, Gadamer, Baudelaire
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 131; Downloads: 45
Full text (440,24 KB)

Abstract: This piece makes a claim for the transformative power of hermeneutics by seeing in the tradition places of undischarged Utopian potential, which are often found in a close hermeneutic engagement with poetry. All such readings, it is argued, ought to meet the four watchwords of any contemporary interpretation viz., that such readings be non-orthodox, non-nostalgic, non-rejectionist, and non-apocalyptic. Such a reading is attempted of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” against the backdrop of an interpretation of insights from Gianni Vattimo. All this is meant to be evidence as well of the dire necessity of the Humanities.
Keywords: tradition, poetry, non-orthodox, non-nostalgic, non-rejectionist, nonapocalyptic, utopian, hermeneutics, transformation, humanities
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 130; Downloads: 35
Full text (357,67 KB)