Tag: General Hermeneutics
Kuhn and Popper
Thomas Kuhn acknowledges that Sir Karl Popper’s work earlier in the twentieth century somewhat anticipated his own view of science (Kuhn, Essential Tension 267). Nevertheless, Kuhn also identifies two meaningful distinctions that his work has vis-à-vis Popper’s (Worrall 66–71). First, Kuhn perceives favorably deep commitments to normal scientific traditions because these traditions (1) encourage substantive…
Kuhn and Kant
In the later half of the twentieth-century, Thomas Kuhn reappropriated and significantly adapted Immanuel Kant’s qualifications of empirical science (Kuhn, Essential Tension 336–37; Kuhn, Since Structure 103–104, 264). First published in 1962, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions replaced Kant’s transcendental truths of reason with theoretical ‘paradigms’ (cf. Kuhn, Since Structure 264). This understanding puts Kuhn…
History and Hermeneutics
To the extent that New Testament Studies is a historical discipline, it shares the features of other historical disciplines. Among these features are its own historical-affectedness: If we are trying to understand a historical phenomenon from the historical distance that is characteristic of our hermeneutical situation, we are always already affected by history. It determines…
Roland Deines on Halakah and Community Definition
In reading Roland Deines’ essay in Second Temple Judaism (“The Pharisees Between ‘Judaisms’ and ‘Common Judaism’”), I came across the following, astute paragraph: If it is correct that it was particularly halakah that constituted Pharisees as Pharisees, it is also true that it constituted Essenes as Essenes and Sadducees as Sadducees. The same can be…
A Hermeneutic of Love
Communication is hermeneutical; it involves people sending and receiving messages. To make the communication process work, the sender(s) and receiver(s) both have to meet their own particular, communicative responsibilities. Of course, with literature like the New Testament, the people who sent the messages it contains cannot clarify or supplement anything they have already said. So,…
Summary of Validity in Interpretation
Alan Knox has made my summary of E. D. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation available on his website, ̔Ελληνιστί, in HTML format. A PDF version of this summary is also available here. Update (19 June 2017): The above-noted link to Alan Knox’s website is currently broken. Please see the summary at the PDF link mentioned above.…