Books on the topic 'Hermeneutics of Space'

The book series, edited by Nicoletta Pesaro and sponsored by the Department of Asian and North African Studies, aims to give voice to a time-honoured branch of theoretical and practical research across the disciplines and research domains within the Department. The series aims to establish a platform for scholarly discussion and a space for international dialogue on the translation of Asian and North African languages. In doing so, the project aims to observe and verify the translingual and transcultural dynamics triggered by translation from and into said ‘languages-cultures’, as well as to identify and explore the deep cultural mechanisms and structures involved in interethnic behaviours and relationships. Translation is also a major research tool in the humanities. As a matter of fact, a hermeneutic potential in terms of cultural mediation is inherent in translation activities and in the reflection on translation: it is precisely this potential that allows scholars, in both their research and dissemination work, to bring to the surface the interethnic and intercultural dynamics regulating the relationships between civilisations, both diachronically and synchronically. The project is a continuation and a development of the research carried out in recent years by the former Department of East Asian Studies – now Department of Asian and North African Studies – of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice through a series of initiatives organised by the research group on the translation of Asian languages “Laboratorio sulla Traduzione delle Lingue orientali” (Laboratori sulle lingue orientali). Such activities involved periodical meetings on translation, whose objective was to introduce and discuss specific issues in translation from and into Asian languages, as well as several international events (workshops, conferences, and symposia).

The biblical scholarship Spinoza deploys in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) stands in a long tradition of humanist philology. The radical thrust of the book lay not so much in the techniques as in the conclusions which Spinoza, spurred by his philosophical agenda, allowed himself to draw from the results. His historical contextualization of the biblical Sitz im Leben resembled what humanist philologists like Joseph Scaliger had done long before: a reconstruction of the circumstances in which a text was produced, with an eye to time, space, and culture. The central chapters in the Tractatus also show that Spinoza was not the most outstanding representative of this scholarly tradition. Drawing, for example, on the commentary in his particular edition of the Hebrew Bible, Spinoza relied only indirectly on Rabbinic source materials, which led him to misrepresent them unduly.

This chapter argues that a meta-theoretical approach to sources opens reflexive spaces, situates theories in time and space, and allows for a contextual interpretation of sources. Drawing on the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the writings of his most perceptive readers in international law, the chapter develops a concept of reflexive situatedness. Following the traces of international law’s current ‘turn to interpretation’ and a reading of international law as ‘hermeneutical enterprise’, the chapter’s assessment of the limits and potentials of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics prepares the ground for an analysis of the writings of international lawyers who have developed theories of international legal interpretation inspired by his work. Gadamer’s conversational hermeneutics moreover opens new perspectives for a contextual theory and praxis of international legal interpretation. Such would allow for a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of sources and their interpreters within their respective interpretative communities.

This chapter offers an introduction to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, with particular attention to their distinctive Bible-reading strategies. The aim is broad description rather than detailed commentary and is highly selective owing to the limited space available. The chapter begins with the acknowledgment that the topic is a difficult one for outsiders, and with that caveat in place, then turns to general characteristics of Watch Tower hermeneutics. As much as possible, the study relies on examples of interpretation drawn from (more or less recent) Watch Tower publications. There are also a few notes about the organization’s New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures.

Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, this book develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in human lives. Focusing on how narratives enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which people act, think, and reimagine the world, it proposes a theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical potential and the risks of storytelling. It elaborates a narrative hermeneutics that treats narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practices that can be oppressive, empowering, or both, and argues that the relationship between narrative unconscious and narrative imagination shapes one’s sense of the possible. Its hermeneutic narrative ethics differentiates between six dimensions of narratives’ ethical potential: they can cultivate a sense of the possible; promote self-understanding; enable understanding other lives non-subsumptively in their singularity; transform narrative in-betweens; develop the capacity for perspective-taking; and function as forms of ethical inquiry. These aspects are analyzed in dialogue with literary and autobiographical narratives that deal with the legacy of the Second World War by problematizing the adequacy of the perpetrator–victim dichotomy—exploring how it is as dialogic storytellers, fundamentally vulnerable, interdependent, and implicated in violent histories, that individuals and communities become who they are. The book brings into dialogue narrative ethics, literary narrative studies, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, and cultural memory studies. It develops narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rigorous, historically sensitive, and analytically subtle approach to the ethical stakes of the debate on the narrative dimension of human existence.

This essay discusses Buddhist ethics from Zen and Huayan Buddhist perspectives. It proposes that Zen Buddhist ethics underlines the importance of the ethical agent’s awareness of the fundamental gap between the reality of the world and the agent’s capacity to fully understand the total reality, and this gap inevitably creates a tension in the ethical agent’s mind. This tension is a positive guideline that demands of the ethical agent a constant and consistent self-reflection when making ethical decisions. Moral norms can offer a contour of our ethical life, but, from the Zen and Huayan perspectives, crucial to ethical reasoning is one’s capacity to be aware of multifaceted causes and conditions that generate an event and the venerability of the ethical agent’s hermeneutic capacity to fully grasp the total realty. Ethics emerges in the space of this tension when the tension is positively channeled through the moral agent’s self-cultivation.

Chapter 1 situates the book within current scholarly debate on the ethical significance of narrative for human existence. It articulates the need for a framework that allows one to explore the ethical complexity of the roles that narratives play in human lives by acknowledging both their ethical potential and risks. It outlines narrative hermeneutics as an approach that enables an analysis of how narratives enlarge and diminish the space of possibilities in which people act, think, experience, and reimagine the world together with others. The chapter maps the trajectory and key concepts of the project, including narrative unconscious and narrative imagination, the relation of which crucially defines one’s sense of the possible. It explains how the book draws on, brings together, and contributes to the following fields: (1) narrative ethics, (2) literary narrative studies and ethical criticism, (3) philosophy of narrative, (4) narrative psychology, and (4) cultural memory studies.

This Handbook offers an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research in the study of religion. Its fifty-one chapters, written by authors from twelve countries, are organized into seven systematic parts. Part I (“Religion”) comprises chapters on definitions and theories of religion, history/translation, spirituality, and non-religion. Part II (“Theoretical Approaches”) reviews cognitive science, economics, evolutionary theory, feminism/gender theory, hermeneutics, Marxism, postcolonialism, semantics, semiotics, structuralism/poststructuralism, and social theory. Part III (“Modes”) addresses communication, materiality, narrative, performance, sound, space, and time. Part IV (“Environments”) relates religion to economy, law, media, nature, medicine, politics, science, sports, and tourism. Part V (“Topics”) discusses belief, emotion, experience, gift and sacrifice, gods, initiations and transitions, priests/prophets/sorcerers, purity, and salvation. Part VI (“Processes”) deals with differentiation, the disintegration and death of religions, expansion, globalization, individualization/privatization, innovation/tradition, objectification/commoditization, and syncretism/hybridization. Part VII (“The Discipline”) discusses the history and relevance of the study of religion.

During a tumultuous phase in Roman Republican politics M. Terentius Varro’s De Lingua Latina developed a complex and nuanced hermeneutic toolkit for citizen self-fashioning. Cicero once complimented Varro as the man whose work had led Romans home to a knowledge of themselves as agents within a specific and acculturated space. This chapter explores how De Lingua Latina works to deliver to successful readers a particular form of self-knowledge as Latin speakers within Roman space. Moving through the city, and being evaluated as part of that process, is central to Roman political agency; yet Varro’s Rome produces a sense of solitary progress through ostensibly random slices of city life, thus, the dérive, and the idea of cartographies of influence, become important. Moreover, the rich semiotic quality of the topography accompanies a more pragmatic story, drawing in politics, consumption, and agribusiness to defamiliarize individual and collective diurnal city rhythms.

Environmental ethics is an academic subfield of philosophy concerned with normative and evaluative propositions about the world of nature and, perhaps more generally, the moral fabric of relations between human beings and the world we occupy. This Handbook contains forty-five newly commissioned essays written by leading experts and emerging voices. The essays range over a broad variety of issues, concepts, and perspectives that are both central to and characteristic of the field, thus providing an authoritative but accessible account of the history, analysis, and prospect of ideas that are essential to contemporary environmental ethics. The Handbook includes sections on the broad social contexts in which we find ourselves (e.g., chapters on history, science, economics, governance, and the Anthropocene), on what ought to count morally and why (e.g., chapters on humanity, animals, living individuals, ecological collectives, and wild nature), on the nature and meaning of environmental values (e.g., truth and goodness, practical reasons, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and aesthetics), on theoretical understandings of how we should act (e.g., on consequentialism, duty and obligation, character, caring relationships, and the sacred), on key concepts (e.g., responsibility, justice, gender, rights, ecological space, risk and precaution, citizenship, future generations, and sustainability), on specific areas of environmental concern (e.g., pollution, population, energy, food, water, mass extinction, technology and ecosystem management), on climate change considered as the defining environmental problem of our time (e.g., chapters on mitigation, adaptation, diplomacy, and geoengineering), and on social change (e.g., pragmatism, conflict, sacrifice, and action).

This essay explores prosthesis as a hermeneutic model for the analysis of musical form and expression in Beethoven, with special attention given to codas and other parageneric spaces such as slow introductions. Codas in general, and Beethoven’s in particular, are theorized as extrinsic musical spaces that serve compensatory functions in relation to the normalized musical body of the sonata form. In a literal sense, a prosthetic compensates the disabled body by enhancing or remediating functions that deviate from the normal. Prosthesis thus becomes the means through which the relationships of inclusion and difference are mediated. By focusing on Beethoven’s slow introductions and codas and then recasting them as prosthetic spaces, the essay also revisits a famous exchange between critics Joseph Kerman and Charles Rosen on the topic of Beethoven’s codas, in order to resituate relational musical difference within more recent theories of musical form.

“Interpreting Interpretations,” Chapter 6 of A New Narrative for Psychology, discusses the premises for the analysis of narratives in research in the field of psychology and in everyday life. The chapter focuses on how researchers think about narratives after the data have been collected and on how narratives should be understood and analyzed. It details an interpretative, hermeneutic approach to narrative analysis in which the interpreter is always once removed, always interpreting the interpretations of others. It argues that there are no recipes for narrative analysis, only general analytic strategies. The process of narrative analysis is one of asking questions in order to open up the data and understand the complex relationships between a particular interpretative action and the contexts of person, time, and space.

Herder brings the entire human being into focus by tracing its connections with the natural, cultural, and historical world. The first part of the volume examines the various dimensions of Herder’s philosophical understanding of human nature through which he sought methodologically to delineate a genuinely anthropological philosophy. This includes his critique of traditional metaphysics and its revision along anthropological lines; the metaphysical, epistemological, and physiological dimensions of his theory of the soul-body relationship; his conception of aesthetics as the study of the sensuous basis of knowledge; and the relationship between the human and natural sciences. The second part then examines further aspects of this understanding of human nature and what emerges from it: the human-animal distinction; how human life evolves over space and time on the basis of a natural order; the fundamentally hermeneutic dimension to human existence; and the interrelatedness of language, history, religion, and culture.

Chapter 4 tests hermeneutic narrative ethics as a lens for analyzing the (ab)uses of narrative for life in Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau (2007, The Blind Side of the Heart), exploring how narrative practices expand and diminish the space of possibilities in which moral agents act and suffer. It demonstrates how narrative “in-betweens” bind people together, through dialogic narrative imagination, and can promote exclusion that amounts to annihilation. It addresses the necessity of storytelling for survival, and a transgenerational culture of silence that leads to the repetition of harmful emotional-behavioral patterns. It explores the continuum from being able to tell one’s own stories to violently imposed narrative identities and suggests that moral agency requires a minimum narrative sense of oneself as a being worthy and capable of goodness. The chapter argues that the ethical evaluation of narrative practices must be contextual—sensitive to how they function in particular sociohistorical worlds.

Beethoven’s music is often associated with freedom. Chua explores the nature of this relationship through an investigation of the philosophical context of Beethoven’s reception and hermeneutic readings of key works. Freedom is arguably the core value of modernity since late eighteenth-century; Beethoven’s music engages with its aspirations and dilemmas, providing a sonic ‘lens’ that enables us to focus on the aesthetic, philosophical, and theological ramifications of its claims of progress and autonomy and the formation of the self and its values. Taking his bearings from Adorno’s fragmentary reflections on Beethoven, Chua charts a journey from the heroic freedom associated with the Eroica Symphony to a freedom of vulnerability that opens itself to ‘otherness’. Chua’s analysis of the music demonstrates how various forms of freedom are embodied in the way time and space are manipulated in Beethoven’s works, providing an experience of a concept that Kant had famously declared inaccessible to sense. Beethoven’s music, then, does not simply mirror freedom; it is a philosophical and poetic engagement with the idea that is as relevant today as it was in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Popular culture is saturated with claims about a science of human life. Demographics are said to predict how we will vote; chemicals in our brains, who we’ll date; game-like scenarios, how we’ll spend our money; and genes, what we will think. This book explores this flood of scientism as it has spread in the last fifty years into almost all facets of daily existence. Readers will discover how popular pseudoscience has radically changed the world we live in, including spheres as different as dating, economics, politics, and artificial intelligence. The abuse of popular scientific authority has had catastrophic consequences, contributing to the 2008 financial crisis, the failure to predict the rise of Donald Trump, increased tensions between poor communities and the police, and the sidelining of nonscientific forms of knowledge and wisdom. But this book also shows a way out of the superstition and ideology of scientism. This book introduces readers to the “hermeneutic” or interpretive approach, which promises to free ordinary people from the tyranny of pseudoscience. An interpretive approach to human life offers a way to become a better reader of both the many claims to science around us and the cultural spaces we inhabit and help create.

Herder is very much a thinker for our time. Instead of approaching facets of human existence in an isolated fashion, he brings the entire human being into focus by tracing its connections with the natural, cultural, and historical world. Through this integrated approach, Herder’s anthropology develops a holistic understanding of the human sphere in relation to our existence as natural creatures who are crucially marked by the fact that we have language and thought, and understand and express meaning in our actions. By illuminating these contextual dimensions of human existence, Herder’s anthropology resonates with many demands and needs arising today, when national and cultural interests—and conflicts—take on new, and old, forms in the wake of unprecedented global challenges. The first part of the volume examines the various dimensions of Herder’s philosophical understanding of human nature through which he sought methodologically to delineate a genuinely anthropological philosophy. This includes his critique of traditional metaphysics and its revision along anthropological lines; the metaphysical, epistemological, and physiological dimensions of his theory of the soul-body relationship; his conception of aesthetics as the study of the sensuous basis of knowledge; and the relationship between the human and natural sciences. The second part then examines further aspects of this understanding of human nature and what emerges from it: the human-animal distinction; how human life evolves over space and time on the basis of a natural order; the fundamentally hermeneutic dimension to human existence; and the interrelatedness of language, history, religion, and culture.

Os textos produzidos na denominada América Portuguesa (1500-1822) abrangem os mais variados campos das letras ocidentais – lírica, épica, dramaturgia, historiografia, epistolografia, parenética, lexicografia, etc. – e seguem um modelo retórico-poético e teológico-político comum, próprio das Letras do Ancien Régime. Manuscritos e impressos escritos em várias línguas (português, principalmente, mas também em latim, castelhano, francês, italiano, tupi-guarani, língua geral, etc.), por um número de autores considerável (Pero Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, Antônio Vieira, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Gregório de Matos, Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto, Francisco Alves de Sousa, etc.), corriam com avidez entre os leitores. São justamente esses textos, esses autores e esses leitores os que conformam o sistema cultural das Letras na América Portuguesa. A historiografia brasileira, portuguesa e inclusive internacional tem se debruçado há já vários decênios no estudo dos Estados do Brasil e do Maranhão e Grão-Pará, tanto de um ponto de vista micro-histórico como macro-histórico, salientando-se nos últimos tempos a sua relação com o resto do mundo, no âmbito próprio da global history. Nos últimos decênios, ao mesmo tempo, a literatura vem perdendo, paulatinamente, o seu poder de conhecimento legitimador das elites culturais de uma nação. Esse esquecido «Parnaso Brasileiro» mantinha, no entanto, um fluido diálogo cultural com Lisboa assim como com outras cidades europeias, diálogo esse que os processos de formação das literaturas exclusivamente nacionais, brasileira e/ou portuguesa, vieram apagar ou até mesmo ignorar. No espaço hermenêutico próprio dos Atlantic Studies, recuperam-se, neste livro, as Letras escritas e lidas na América Portuguesa, estudam-se seus autores, interpretam-se textos escolhidos e indaga-se tanto sobre seus primeiros leitores, como sobre seus leitores de ontem e de hoje. Um conjunto de docentes do Brasil, de Portugal, da Alemanha e da Espanha discute textos de Vaz de Caminha, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Antônio Vieira, Botelho de Oliveira, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto e Santa Rita Durão, entre outros. Die in der sogenannten »América Portuguesa« (1500-1822) entstandenen Texte gehören zu verschiedensten Diskursformen der westlichen Literatur und Kultur: Lyrik, Epik, Dramaturgie, Historiographie, Epistolographie, Homiletik, Lexikographie usw. Sie folgen einem gemeinsamen rhetorisch-poetischen und theologisch-politischen Modell, das charakteristisch für die Texte des Ancien Régime war. Manuskripte und Drucke in verschiedenen Sprachen (hauptsächlich Portugiesisch, aber auch Latein, Spanisch, Französisch, Italienisch, Tupi-Guarani, Língua Geral etc.) von einer beachtlichen Anzahl von Autoren (Pero Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, Antônio Vieira, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Gregório de Matos, Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto, Francisco Alves de Sousa usw.) fanden eine umfassende Leserschaft. All diese Elemente - Texte, Autoren und Leserschaft – bilden das System der »Letras« in der »América Portuguesa«. Die brasilianische, portugiesische und sogar die internationale Geschichtsschreibung konzentriert sich seit mehreren Jahrzehnten auf das Studium der Kolonialstaaten Brasil und Maranhão e Grão-Pará sowohl aus mikro- als auch aus makrohistorischer Sicht. Gleichzeitig verliert die Literatur in den letzten Jahrzehnten allmählich die Funktion, das Wissen der kulturellen Eliten einer Nation zu legitimieren. Der aktuell wenig beachtete »Parnaso Brasileiro« unterhielt einen intensiven kulturellen Dialog mit Lissabon wie auch mit anderen europäischen Städten, einen Dialog, der der Ausbildung ausschließlich nationaler Literaturen, brasilianischer und/oder portugiesischer, wenig Stellenwert einräumte oder sie sogar ignorierte. Im hermeneutischen Raum, den die Atlantic Studies eröffnen, erschließt dieses Buch die in der »América Portuguesa« geschriebenen und gelesenen Texte, beschäftigt sich mit ihren Autoren, interpretiert ausgewählte Texte und fragt nach ihren ersten Lesern sowie nach ihren Leserinnen und Lesern gestern und heute. Eine Gruppe von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern aus Brasilien, Portugal, Deutschland und Spanien diskutiert Texte u.a. von Vaz de Caminha, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Antônio Vieira, Botelho de Oliveira, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto und Santa Rita Durão. The texts produced in the so-called “América Portuguesa” (1500-1822) cover the most varied fields of Western Literature and Culture – lyric, epic, dramaturgy, historiography, epistolography, homiletics, lexicography, etc. – and follow a common rhetorical-poetic and theological-political model, typical for the Ancien Régime. Manuscripts and prints were written in various languages (Portuguese, mainly, but also Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, Tupi-Guarani, Língua Geral, etc.), by a considerable number of authors (Pero Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, Antônio Vieira, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Gregório de Matos, Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto, Francisco Alves de Sousa, etc.) found a broad reception by readers. Precisely, these texts, these authors and these readers constituted the literary system in the “América Portuguesa”. Brazilian, Portuguese, and even international historiography has focused for several decades on the study of the colonial states Brasil and Maranhão e Grão-Pará, both from a micro-historical and macro-historical point of view, emphasizing recently their relationship with the rest of the world in the context of global history. Currently, literature is gradually losing its power of legitimising knowledge of the cultural elites of a nation. This forgotten “Parnaso Brasileiro” maintained, however, a fluid cultural dialogue with Lisbon as well as with other European cities, a dialogue that the formation of exclusively national literatures, Brazilian and/or Portuguese, came to neglect or even ignore. In the hermeneutic space opened up by the Atlantic Studies, this book deals with texts written and read in the “América Portuguesa”, studies its authors, interprets selected works and inquires both about its first readers and about its readers yesterday and today. A group of scholars from Brazil, Portugal, Germany and Spain discusses texts by Vaz de Caminha, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Antônio Vieira, Botelho de Oliveira, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto and Santa Rita Durão, among others.