181. The Gadamer–Habermas Debate through Mahabharata’s Women : Intersectional Feminist Engagements with Tradition and CritiqueKanchana Mahadevan, 2022, original scientific article 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: 59; Downloads: 18
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182. “Molt greignour senefiance" : The Role of Interpreters in The Quest of the Holy GrailAlenka Koželj, 2022, original scientific article Abstract: In the 13th-century French romance The Quest of the Holy Grail various interpreters appear, who—through Christian hermeneutics—explain to the knights of the quest their dreams, visions, prophecies, etc. The present article discusses the question of the source of authority of the interpreters, and analyzes in the text itself the foundations of such an authority. One of the most important starting points is the presupposition that the procedures of biblical exegesis influenced the romance and the image of the interpreter.
Keywords: hermeneutics, Middle Ages, quest, interpreter, biblical exegesis
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 62; Downloads: 19
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183. Hamlet and the Philosophical Interpretation of LiteratureWilliam Franke, 2022, original scientific article 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: 50; Downloads: 19
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184. Tolerance in Utopian DiscourseMonika Brzóstowicz-Klajn, 2022, original scientific article Abstract: In this article, the problem of tolerance is discussed with regard to some of the most important utopias in the European tradition, namely by Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, and Francis Bacon. This allows us to show these works from the point of view of hidden paradoxes. Utopian discource, on the one hand, creates models of static, unchangeable, more or less homogeneous societies that remain separated from the world. On the other hand, tolerance means an attitude of openness towards diversity and, thus, towards dialogue as well as the possibility of change. Nevertheless, tolerance within utopias appeares under certain conditions. The article attempts to show how it is captured in particular utopian works and what additional meanings it reveals. The problem of tolerance can be a criterium for criticizing the utopian projects. This is the case with the twentieth-century concept of an open society by Karl Popper and with critical statements about it made by Leszek Kołakowski and Ryszard Legutko.
Keywords: tolerance, utopian discourse, open society, absolute ethics
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 61; Downloads: 21
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185. The Interweaving of Life and Text : Authorial Inscription and Readerly Self-Understanding Exemplified in Les Fleurs du malJulio Jensen, 2022, original scientific article 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: 59; Downloads: 22
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186. Between In-Vocation and Pro-Vocation : A Hermeneutics of the Poetic PrayerMałgorzata Hołda, 2022, original scientific article Abstract: This article investigates the phenomenon of poetic prayer as one that happens in the liminal space between the in-vocation of a close relationship with God and the provocation of versatile responses to God’s presence. The hermeneutic in-between of an experience of God—intimate, ecstatic, and absolutizing, but also unsettling, doubting, and desperate—engenders a genuine possibility to investigate the less obvious aspects of poetry as prayer, and to delve deeper into its complexities and subtleties. The analyzed poems by G. M. Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and R. M. Rilke disclose the inner world of a human being who yearns for God, but also has the courage to question and listen to an inner voice that torments and tears asunder. A hermeneutic reading of poetry as prayer invites us to acknowledge that an authentic and close relationship with God goes beyond an equivocal and facile response and entails what is sidelined, destabilizing, or even threatening to the safe self. The hermeneutic examination of poetic prayer also inspires us to think of the human body as a legitimate and meaningful site of the encounter between the human and the divine.
Keywords: hermeneutics, poetic prayer, G. M. Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 56; Downloads: 21
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187. Quests and Questioning or Again and AgainRamsey Eric Ramsey, 2022, original scientific article 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: 63; Downloads: 18
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188. Mood as Interpretive Category : Experience as a Form of UnderstandingBeata Przymuszała, 2022, original scientific article Abstract: The article discusses the functioning of the notion of mood in various fields (philosophy, psychology, architecture, literary studies). In this context, the mood becomes a way of experiencing oneself in the world (referring primarily to Martin Heidegger’s concept). To be in a mood means—to be in the world, to experience the world, to try to understand it. To be in a mood is to feel your body and your mind in the world. The mood captured in this way allows a different reading of selected poems by Halina Poświatowska—the sensuality of this poetry can be understood as a phenomenological record of experiencing oneself in the world.
Keywords: mood, understanding, world, Martin Heidegger, Halina Poświatowska
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 70; Downloads: 20
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190. Personambiguity in Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another and the Abyssal Surface of ResponsibilitySimeon Theojaya, 2022, original scientific article Abstract: Numerous studies across disciplines discuss the complex relationship between human facial features and personal identity in psychosocial dynamics. Most of these researches follow the common definition of the face as the forepart of the head. Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) is a Japanese novel that explores the face’s complexity in great depth and contests this common notion of the face. First, this novel shows that the search for meaning behind the face’s physical properties is lacerated by discords of individuality/abstraction and identity/pretense. These straining pairs (which I call personambiguity) exemplify Lévinas’s point that the face’s meaning outweighs its phenomenality. Second, this novel presents that the constraint and primacy of responsibility transcend the face’s sensible qualities. My reading holds that the face is an abyssal surface, in which the other manifests itself against our appropriative idea of otherness and summons us to irrecusable responsibility.
Keywords: Abe, ethics, face, Lévinas, phenomenology
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 72; Downloads: 18
Full text (383,19 KB) |
