Tag: H.-G. Gadamer

  • How Do You Choose a Good Research Topic?

    How Do You Choose a Good Research Topic?

    The ability to “see what is questionable” and to ask questions accordingly is the first step in choosing a good research topic.

  • Who Is Your Research Question Good For?

    Who Is Your Research Question Good For?

    Your research question can be known or unknown by your audience. But they need to have the question before you can answer it.

  • The Fusion of Rhetoric and Hermeneutics

    The Fusion of Rhetoric and Hermeneutics

    At first glance, rhetoric and hermeneutics are quite different things.1 Rhetoric deals with argument and persuasion, hermeneutics with examination and understanding. But, if we look more closely, they comingle in a way that makes them inseparable. To begin, both rhetorical and hermeneutical reflection take the form of considering existing practice (21).2 Already in the earliest…

  • Theology’s Hermeneutic Interest

    H.-G. Gadamer concludes his essay on “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem” by commenting on the importance of language, with an interestingly theological turn. Gadamer suggests, The … building up of our own world in language persists whenever we want to say something to each other. The result is the actual relationship of men to…

  • The Hermeneutic Productivity of the Familiar

    In his essay on “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem,” H.-G. Gadamer draws upon Aristotle’s analogy between an army halting its retreat and the experience of coming to understanding. The halt may be so gradual that an observer can say when individuals within the army stop fleeing, but it’s more difficulty to say when the…

  • Rhetorical “small change”

    In his 1963 essay on the “Phenomenological Movement.” H.-G. Gadamer discusses at length Edmund Husserl’s influence in founding the school. In so doing, he recounts an interesting habit of Husserl’s that In his teaching, whenever he encountered the grand assertions and arguments typical of beginning philosophers, he used to say, “Not always the big bills,…