Managing one's own emotions and those of others is a form of labour. Some people get paid for this work (e.g., flight attendants). However, often the effort that goes into becoming an emotional management expert goes unnoticed and stays in the invisible background of what appear to be naturally flowing relationships. But what about another …
Continue reading Spreading the Word: Emotional and Hermeneutic Labour
What world do you live in? Is it the same as the one I inhabit? What about your friends, family, each and every person you pass by in the street, and all those billions you will never meet? In one sense, we all inhabit the same world - our one and only pale blue dot, …
Continue reading Worlds and World-Travelling according to Maria Lugones
Is language fundamental to our understanding and interpretation of experiences? Can something be experienced as meaningful without our participation in a language-world and its structures of meaning? Would we even consider something an experience if we couldn't make sense (i.e., create a meaningful unity relying on meaning structures we inhabit) of that "something" we encountered? …
Continue reading Can We Understand Meaning Without Language?
"We always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is also true of the hermeneutic situation—i.e., the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand. The illumination of this situation—reflection on effective history—can never …
Continue reading Philosophical Quote About Our Self-Understanding
A quote on understanding as a way of creating meaning, from German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's book, Truth and Method.
Quotes about art as an act of increased being by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer from his magnum opus, Truth and Method.
German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer on the formative influence of our public image - we are expected to become what we present ourselves to be.
We, humans, are remarkably flexible beings. Sometimes, we surprise even ourselves if we pay attention. For example, take Jacques Derrida's idea of deconstruction. As a way of thinking, it takes a settled meaning we accept as true and dismantles it to show how inherently arbitrary any one such interpretation is. In other words, its opposite …
Last week, I shared with you a video lecture by Dr Michael Sugrue on Hans-Georg Gadamer, an influential 20th-century German philosopher who developed philosophical hermeneutics. This branch of philosophy focuses on human understanding, interpretation, and meaning creation. Today, I share another take on Gadamer's philosophy - Understanding and Dialogue: What I Have Learned from H. …
Continue reading Spreading the Word: Lecture on Gadamer and Hermeneutics II
In today's post, I would like to share with you another fascinating lecture by Dr. Michael Sugrue - Gadamer: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Philosophical hermeneutics is a branch of philosophy interested in human understanding, interpretation, and meaning creation. Hans-Georg Gadamer was a 20th-century German philosopher, a leading thinker whose major work "Truth and Method" (1960) …
Continue reading Spreading the Word: Lecture on Gadamer and Hermeneutics
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