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Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation
The move of the term?hermeneutics?from its original home in textual(atfirst Biblical) interpretation to its new application to history and humanscience owes a great deal to two outstanding twentieth-century philoso-phers, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.The move can be understood in the light of two crucial insights. Thefirstis that?understanding?can have a quite different sense applied to humanaffairs from that which it has in natural science or technology. Under-standing why you made that surprising move involves something ratherdifferent from understanding why my car broke down. Thus we oftensay things like (1)?I can?t understand him. He seems to be sabotaging,undermining his most cherished goal?; or (2)?That reaction seems totallyover the top, uncalled for?; or (3)?He seems to be deliberately provokingopposition?; or (4)?Why did she put her demand in those terms, whichalmost guaranteed refusal??In all these cases, the actor is (provisionally)opaque to us; we cannot understand him or her.We explain properly, we make sense of the action/response, when weadd to or complexify the range of meanings or motivations actually operat-ing here. It was Dilthey who made this point most forcefully, and he influ-enced some important twentieth-century sociologists, like Max Weber.The second point is that there are important features in common betweenmaking sense of human beings and understanding texts. In particular, acertain kind of circularity attaches to both types of account. The aim, in theoriginal context of Bible interpretation, was often to clarify a particularpassage which was uncertain or enigmatic. But the reading offered of thispassage or verse had to make sense within the presumed overall meaning ofthe entire chapter, book, and ultimately, of the whole Bible. One could thususe the sense of the whole to make sense of the part. But a question canalways be raised: do we understand fully the meaning of the whole?There is a circle here, but not a vicious one. It doesn?t involve thenotorious?circular argument?, where one assumes the conclusion amongthe premises. On the contrary, the attempt is to bring the arguments inboth directions into an equilibrium in which one makes maximum sense ofthe text. But a similar circularity applies to making sense of action. sense we make of a certain passage of history or biography has tofitwith our reading of what came before and after. Now from this similaritybetween text interpretation and making sense, a third one arises. Biblicalhermeneutics aims to make better sense of text than we have up to now.But this brings us to an impossibility of claiming closure. No matter howconvincing our present reading, it is always possible that someone couldpropose a better one. And the same applies to human action in history.This interesting collection illustrates not only Ricoeur?s contribution tothe translation of hermeneutics to the newfields, but also some of theextraordinarily creative uses he made of it..PSB - FEB UI / Buka di https://remote-lib.ui.ac.id/menu, pilih EBSCOhost dan search melalui judul atau Pengarang. Atau Hub Pustakawan.
Call Number | Location | Available |
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Tan 686 Ric h ( ebook ) | PSB lt.dasar - Pascasarjana | 0 |
Penerbit | Cambridge Cambridge University Press., 2016 |
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Edisi | - |
Subjek | Hermeneutics Social sciences?Philosophy |
ISBN/ISSN | - |
Klasifikasi | - |
Deskripsi Fisik | - |
Info Detail Spesifik | - |
Other Version/Related | Tidak tersedia versi lain |
Lampiran Berkas | Tidak Ada Data |