Theodore George

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Texas A&M University

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...

Hermeneutics has a long tradition in the history of philosophy. It carries the task of Hermes to bring God s message to humans and translate it without betraying it. This special issue of the journal Critical Hermeneutics proposes a double research track: veritative hermeneutics and hermeneutic realism. This double track testifies to the original p...

Significant proponents of both postmodern and realistic hermeneutics suggest that our efforts to understand are better when they involve a plurality of interpretative perspectives. The author of this essay argues, however, that a realist approach can provide a more persuasive reason for this orientation toward plurality. Postmodern approaches in he...

Gadamer’s Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary offers a fresh look at Gadamer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method, which was first published in German in 1960, translated into English in 1975, and is widely recognized as a ground-breaking text of philosophical hermeneutics. The volume features essays from fourteen scholars—both established and ris...

Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is important to phenomenology for a number of reasons. Chief among these, perhaps, is that Gadamer describes his philosophical hermeneutics as an attempt to build on and even advance beyond the early Heidegger’s break from the transcendental idealism of Husserl’s phenomenology. Yet Gadamer’s philosophical hermen...

"Hermeneutics" entry, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

What is the significance of hermeneutics at the intersections of ethics, politics and the arts and humanities? This book: -Discusses how hermeneutics offers ways to develop an ethics -Makes the case for the relevance of contemporary hermeneutics for current scholarly discussions of responsibility within continental European philosophy -Contributes...

In this article, the author argues that Gadamer's hermeneutics provides a better account of hermeneutical responsibility than Vattimo's. In this, the author argues that Gadamer's hermeneutics thus also provides a better basis for critique than Vattimo's.

The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015 - edited by Kelly Becker November 2019

Examines the role that poets and the poetic word play in the formation of philosophical thinking in the modern German tradition. Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, l...

The purpose of this article is to examine Hans-Georg Gadamer’s considerations of the hermeneutical significance of the body. This theme may come as a surprise, given that Gadamer has criticized himself for not having done enough to elucidate the hermeneutics of the body. In this essay, I argue, however, that Gadamer makes important contributions to...

In this essay, the author argues that Dennis Schmidt’s considerations of ethical life, when taken together, comprise a prescient and distinctive response to Heidegger’s call to pursue an ‘original ethics.’ In this, Schmidt disavows discourses within the discipline of ethics that seek to establish an ethical theory or position, arguing instead that...

Some critics charge that Gadamer’s approach to our experience of art remains mired in conservatism because he believes our experience of artworks depends on tradition. In this essay, I argue that this charge fails to address the full scope of Gadamer’s considerations of our experience of art. This becomes clear with an emendation that Gadamer appea...

In this paper, the author turns to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to examine the experience of grieving. Specifically, the author argues that grieving may be grasped as a limit situation of memory. This approach suggests that grieving cannot be adequately captured by a stage model theory but, instead, poses an infinite task that is...

Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics cannot fully be understood without the contour his project receives from his relation to Kant's third Critique of Judgmentand Hegel's absolute idealism. Although Gadamer's deepest ties are to Heidegger, his thought also remains shaped greatly by the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, as well as figures and...

The purpose of this piece is to examine the contribution made to the philosophical study of hermeneutics by James Risser's recently published book, The Life of Understanding:A Contemporary Hermeneutics. The author argues that Risser's emphasis on the relation of understanding to factical life places him among contemporaries, such as Donatella di Ce...

The purpose of this presentation is to consider the contour, or, at least, one contour of the responsibility to understand that guides our experience of ourselves as part of the global community. Specifically, I focus on the responsibility that Gadamer suggests we have to foster a robust global culture of translation.

The concern of the present inquiry is whether, and, if so, how, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of hermeneutical understanding can help us grasp the character of our ethical responsibility, and, indeed, a sense of responsibility that remains answerable to the plurality of our always singular and contingent ethical experiences. The focus of this ess...

In this essay, the author argues that Gadamer's approach to world literature contributes to the call for us mutually to discover our solidarities with those from different traditions, and, thus also, different linguistic traditions. He holds that the discovery of global solidarities is urgent because current prospects to address the world's politic...

Summary of the filed of hermeneutics and list of key works.

Abstract The broad concern of this article is to contribute to discussions within hermeneutical philosophy that address the question of life as a form of correlation. More specifically, its purpose is to shed light on the character of life as correlation with reference to a basic aspect of this correlation: our living relation to things. To this en...

The purpose of this essay is to consider the significance that Hegel grants to religious love and, with it, forgiveness in his early The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate. Although Hegel characterizes religious love in this writing as a unity that transcends reason, his association of such love with forgiveness nevertheless sheds light on an impo...

In this essay, the author maintains that Gadamer’s affirmation of the relation among art, truth, and beauty is less a sign of conservatism or nostalgia than it is a key to his innovative and insightful examination of our experience of art. Gadamer’s approach to both the truth claim and the beauty of art flows from his association of the being of ar...

The author argues that Günter Figal sheds novel light on language in his recent Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy through a debate he appears to stage with the position Jacques Derrida develops in some of his early essays on deconstruction. Figal describes language as a form of showing and emphasizes the openness and flexibility of expr...

Appearing for the first time in English, Günter Figal's groundbreaking book in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics offers original perspectives on perennial philosophical problems. Günter Figal has long been recognized as one of the most insightful interpreters working in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics and its leading themes co...

Translator's Introduction to Günter Figal's Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy

Published in Spanish translation by Juanita Maldonado, this article argues that the political significance Hans-Georg Gadamer's attributes to friendship not only resists the criticism of Gadamer (and Heidegger) leveled by Axel Honneth but, moreover, that Gadamer's approach to friendship sheds light on a certain intimacy we experience in our opening...

Theodore George is English translator, Gunter Figal, Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).

This is an introduction to the English translation of Gunter Figal, Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).

This article offers a survey of some main ideas in Günter Figal’s hermeneutics as he presents them in his recent Gegenständlichkeit: Das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie [Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy]. Figal promises a new approach to the philosophical study of hermeneutics in this work that would advance beyond Gadamer, Heidegge...

Although there is much scholarship on Maurice Blanchot’s relationship to his contemporaries on the French intellectual scene, substantially less has been made of his debts to the German philosophical heritage in general, and to G. W. F. Hegel in particular. In this article, the author maintains that Blanchot’s association of literature with workles...

In Tragedies of Spirit, Theodore D. George engages Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit to explore the philosophical significance of tragedy in post-Kantian continental thought. George follows lines of inquiry originally developed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida, and takes as his point of departure the concern that Hegel's speculative phil...

In this essay, the author contends that Schelling’s first publication, the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, provides crucial insights into the wide spread philosophical interest in poetic art today. For Schelling, philosophical inquiry finds that its native resource, reason, requires the disclosive power of the poetic genera of tra...

One of the most pressing issues for contemporary continental philosophy turns on the determination of a concept of community that twists free from the dangerous tendency in the canon of Western thought to associate the perfection of political affiliation with complete unity, even totality and immanence. In this article the author suggests that in t...