Hearing the Other: Communication as Shared Life (original) (raw)
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DEBUT Gadamer and Levinas on the topic of Sociality
Sofía Philosophical Review , 2017
Students of Heidegger, both Gadamer and Levinas present positions on sociality which emphasise care for the other—not only being-in-the-world but being-with others. Both philosophers depart from Heidegger in their stress on responsibility to the other, for the subject always finds himself under a claim. Whilst Gadamer, remaining within the realm of ontology, is concerned with understanding, Levinas moves away from grasping the other towards the very alterity of the other. Further, Gadamer draws particular attention to the said, whilst Levinas prioritises the saying. This paper, in comparing and contrasting these two positions, underlines Gadamer´s emphasis on reconciliation as key to finding common ground between hermeneutics and fundamental ethics.
This paper’s aim is to explore Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in order to draw out implications for the ethics of dialogue. Through examining key interconnected components in Gadamer’s theory, I highlight the openness to the other and otherness as a key normative ideal for dialogic understanding and their influence on the core practical ethos that underpins dialogue encounter, including the ethics of alterity, self-cultivation, equality, reciprocity, and solidarity. We further consider hermeneutical application or praxis by way of a guide insofar as to how one might act in the world through dialogue construed through these ethical dimensions.
Are we a conversation? Hermeneutics, exteriority, transmittability
Research in Phenomenology, 2017
Hermeneutics is widely celebrated as a call for “conversation”—that is, a manner of inquiry characterized by humility and openness to the other that eschews the pretenses of calculative rationality and resists all finality of conclusions. In this, conversation takes shape in efforts to understand and interpret that always unfold in the transmission of meaning historically in language. Yet, the celebration of hermeneutics for humility and openness appears, at least, to risk embarrassment in light of claims found in Heidegger and Gadamer that conversation is always contingent on “prior accord.” Critics of hermeneutics have, for some decades, interpreted this claim of prior accord to refer to a common tradition, so that the understanding achieved in conversation is restricted to those who belong to the same heritage. In this essay, the author argues that although Heidegger and Gadamer often suggest this prior accord is a matter of common tradition, crucial threads of Gadamer’s thought, in particular, recommend a different view. Gadamer, in these threads, offers that “prior accord” concerns not a common tradition, but, on the contrary, the call to participate in hermeneutic transmission as such, even—and no doubt especially—when those in conversation are not familiar with the tradition or language of the other. With this, we are called to converse not first by what the other says, but by the fact that we do not yet understand, that we have already misunderstood, and that we perhaps cannot understand.
The Idea of Dialogue in Gadamer ’ s Hermeneutics
2014
The idea of dialogue occupies arguably the most central position in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer 1960/1989). Dialogue is here not understood merely as the conversation between two subjects about something of common interest in a shared medium of understanding, but rather as the foundational phenomenon within which objects and themes, subjects and perspectives, and common interest and shared understanding are grounded. The foundational character of dialogue derives from the fact that all experience is understood to be linguistically mediated, while language as a medium exists in its true and essential form as dialogue. The strongest support for this approach comes from a phenomenological perspective on understanding, i.e. on what really happens when we understand something, when we make sense of something by interpreting it. Bringing together the encompassing and foundational role of dialogue with its concrete origin in the act of interpretation will yield...
Does Conversation Need Shared Language? Davidson and Gadamer on Communicative Understanding
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2014
In a rare discussion of Gadamer’s work, Davidson takes issue with Gadamer’s claim that successful communication requires that interlocutors share a common language. While he is right to see an difference between his own views and Gadamer’s on this point, Davidson appears to have misunderstood what motivates Gadamer’s position, eliding it with that of his more familiar conventionalist interlocutors. This paper articulates Gadamer’s view of the role of language in communicative understanding as an alternative to both Davidson’s and that of the conventionalist writers Davidson critiques. It is argued, first, that Gadamer employs a conception of what individuates a language, and thus of what it means for two speakers to ‘share’ a language, that Davidson never considers. By emphasizing the role of ‘application’ in the historical development of languages, Gadamer develops a view in which languages are distinguished not by their particular semantic or syntactic rules, but by subtle differences between the concepts they express. Second, it is argued that the instances of ‘asymmetrical’ communication—communication between interlocutors who have different sets of concepts at their disposal—that motivate Gadamer’s position pose a challenge to Davidson’s account of interpretative charity.