Anyone have any opinions of thinking of language in terms of the hermeneutical tradition? Language is the thing through which we use to say something about something. In this way, we look at language as a lived experience. Any thoughts deviating from the Anglo-American tradition would be welcome.

JKT

Greetings,

Could you flesh it out a bit?

JKT

Any thoughts deviating from the Anglo-American tradition would be welcome.

It baffles me why there is a need to emphasize this. Let's not sugar-coat and tell me why. Also, hermeneutics is a very wide subject. Could you narrow down your target argument?

<!-- editby --><br /><br /><i>edited by: mnelson, May 27, 2004 - 05:50 PM</i><!-- end editby -->

If you have not picked up on the fact that there are two simple divisions of emphasis and method in academic philosophy in general and that the continental tradition is not that well represented in the United States, then you should observe the difference and see why I emphasize this line of thinking over what everyone always hears all the time. Could there possibly be value in learning viewpoints from other discourses that are excluded from the mainstream? I see the value in it.

You are right, hermeneutics is wide, but I thought putting Ricoeur's name in the post would reference others.

Also, I have no argument to provide. I am looking for others who know more and could comment, simply to discuss. This and nothing more...practicing philosophy simply for the sake of itself.

If you have not picked up on the fact that we are talking HERMENEUTICS here and not philosophy in general, then you should observe the difference and see why I posed that question. I thought for sure you were going to give me some stock answer that’s frequently invoked by academic skeptics. This just in: Hermeneutics is populated by Gadamer, Habermas Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Schleiermacher, and the other so-called continental philosophers. To talk about “views” deviating from Anglo-American tradition is a misnomer, we ARE deviating from traditional Anglo-American every time we do hermeneutics. Wake up and smell the printer ink.

Btw, Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Suspicion seems to be a very interesting subject. I agree with your choice—however, don’t you think using his theory still does not narrow hermeneutics in general? —Since it is applicable to many subjects of interpretive work. I mean there is the biographical hermeneutics, computational hermeneutics, biblical, etc. Let me know if my "odd inclination" is disturbing you again.

I think we are only talking hermeneutics if we inevitably adopt the assumption of hermeneutics as a philosophy. If we adopt the idea of philosophy as logical analysis as Gilbert Ryle, we will be doing something quite different. If you concur with me that we are talking of interpreting as itself an interpretations, then you and I would agree that even to talk about hermeneutics would be to do hermeneutics. I have refrained from such a judgment because I do not know what assumptions you follow in general in philosophical practice. I HAVE SMELLED THE PRINTER INK so to speak.

As for the deviation, if I called out to any philosophy department in the United States and circulated a survey with the question "Name the first philosopher of language that comes to your head?" Who would it be? Answers like Tarski, Neurath, Russell and WIttgenstein would be the most common. I bet my life on it so much that when I say deviation, I am generally referring to the philosophical climate that everyone else is growing up in. Also, I point to the fact that ephilosopher forum has no continental philosophy subject rooms. The specialised rooms are typical anglo-american logocentrisms.

I think hermeneutics as a philosophy may be spoken of as Ricoeur uses it. He borrows a lot from religious exigesis but I am pretty sure that the various hermeneutics you have listed only take on that label once we get to applied hermeneutics. In general, we can talk of the wide array of Ricoeur's work as he performs the act and the methodical assumptions adjoined to it.

Recently I have been reading how Ricoeur developed his criticism out of an anti-structuralist view. Put simply, he thought of structuralism and linguistics as a science of internal relations. The independent abstraction of language systems separated it from the lived experience of language which is to ultimately say something about something. The lived experience of language he says is the saying.