The Event of Meaning in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy)

"This book presents the first detailed treatment of Gadamer's account of the nature of meaning. It argues both that this account is philosophically valuable in its own right and that understanding it sheds new light on his wider hermeneutical project. Whereas philosophers have typically thought of meanings as belonging to a special class of objects, the central claim of Gadamer's view is that meanings are events. Instead of a pre-existing content that we must unearth through our interpretive efforts, for Gadamer the meaning of a text is what happens when we encounter it in the appropriate way. In events of meaning the world makes itself intelligibly present to us in a manner that is uniquely and irreducibly bound up with the concrete situation in which we find ourselves. When we recognize that Gadamer thinks of meaning in this way, we are better positioned to appreciate what his wider views amount to and how they hang together. Gadamer's accounts of interpretive normativity, the aspectival character of understanding, and the nature of essences, for example, snap into more vivid relief when we see them as outgrowths of his underlying conception of meanings as events. The Event of Meaning in Gadamer's Hermeneutics will especially appeal to researchers and advanced students working in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and the philosophy of language. More broadly it will be of interest to humanities teachers and researchers concerned with the question of how texts from distant cultures can be relevant to readers here and now"-- Cover Endorsement Page Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works by Gadamer Introduction 0.1 Sinn Happens 0.2 Looking Ahead Notes Chapter 1: Occasionality 1.1 Speaking of Occasions 1.2 Occasionality as Irreducible 1.3 The Priority of Natural Language 1.3.1 Technical Terms 1.3.2 Artificial Languages 1.4 Meaning and Metaphor 1.5 Conclusion Notes Chapter 2: Ideality 2.1 The Example of the Performing Arts 2.1.1 Art as Play and Gebilde 2.1.2 The Temporality of the Aesthetic 2.2 Ideality and Textuality 2.2.1 Texts as Self-Sufficient Wholes 2.2.2 Texts as Vocative State-ments 2.3 From Writing Back to Speech 2.4 Unprincipled Unity 2.5 Conclusion Notes Chapter 3: Interpreting Correctly 3.1 Gjesdal’s Critique 3.1.1 The Pitfalls of Political Humanism 3.1.2 An Initial Response 3.2 The Fall and Rise of Substantive Hermeneutics 3.2.1 Schleiermacher and the Eclipse of die Sache 3.2.2 The Hermeneutic Centrality of die Sache 3.3 The Norm of the Subject Matter 3.3.1 The Fore-conception of Completeness as Interpretive Norm 3.3.2 The Force of Charity’s ‘Ought’ 3.4 Conclusion Notes Chapter 4: Originalism and the Fusion of Horizons 4.1 Horizons as Backgrounds 4.2 Horizons as Foregrounds 4.3 Knowing the Language Notes Chapter 5: Aspects of Being 5.1 Aspects as Schematizations 5.2 Aspects as Parts 5.3 The Finitude of Being 5.3.1 Being and Intelligibility 5.3.2 Infinite and Finite Correspondence 5.3.3 Putting Finitude First 5.3.4 Being That Can Be Understood 5.4 Aspects as Presentations 5.5 Conclusion Notes Chapter 6: Essences 6.1 Essences as Causes 6.2 Gadamer as Essentialist 6.3 Essences as Occasional 6.3.1 Occasions for Philosophy 6.3.2 Aspects of Essences 6.4 Essences beyond Aristotle 6.5 Conclusion Notes Chapter 7: The Task of Philosophy 7.1 Praise of Philosophy as Theory 7.1.1 Figal and Kontos’s Critiques 7.1.2 Theoretical and Practical Occasions 7.2 Contextualism without Quietism 7.3 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index