Search Results (38)

(1) Background: This article aims to understand the forms and elements through which the inhabitants of the city of Medellin have configured their subjectivity in the context of the application of neoliberal policies in the last two decades. In this way, we can approach the frameworks of understanding that constitute a fundamental part of the individuation processes in which the incorporation of their subjectivities is evidenced in neoliberal contexts that, in the historical process, have been converging with authoritarian, antidemocratic and neoconservative elements. (2) Method: A qualitative approach with a hermeneutic-interpretative paradigm was used. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 41 inhabitants of Medellín who were politically identified with right-wing or center-right positions. Data analysis included thematic coding to identify patterns of thought and points of view. (3) Results: Participants associate success with individual effort and see state intervention as an obstacle to development. They reject redistributive policies, arguing that they generate dependency. In addition, they justify authoritarian models of government in the name of security and progress, from a moral superiority, which is related to a negative and stigmatizing perception of progressive sectors and a negative view of the social rule of law and public policies with social sense. (4) Conclusions: The naturalization of merit as a guiding principle, the perception of themselves as morally superior based on religious values that grant a subjective place of certainty and goodness; the criminalization of expressions of political leftism, mobilizations and redistributive reforms and support for policies that establish authoritarianism and perpetuate exclusion and structural inequalities, closes roads to a participatory democracy that enables social and economic transformations. Full article

In this paper, I demonstrate that, beyond the notion of prejudice, it is the whole Cartesian framework that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics seems to reject in Truth and Method. I buttress this argument by addressing a gamut of central concepts, namely doubt, evidence, history, life, subjectivity, language, and, most importantly, method itself. In the course of the discussion, I emphasize many fine details of Gadamer’s approach to Cartesianism. I further ask whether Gadamer really succeeds in disentangling himself from a methodical demand that is fundamental for Descartes but that he also underscores in the works of other philosophers, such as Hegel and Heidegger. I suggest that Cartesianism thus appears enlightening to point out the complexities of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Full article

In this article, the author provides a fresh reading of three women-centered narratives from the Gurucaritra, a sixteenth-century Marathi devotional text. Based on the analysis of three distinct narratives from the Gurucaritra, the author examines the narratives through two key lenses: women’s subjectivity and the “hermeneutics of intersubjectivity”. I argue that although women’s voices are absent or marginalized in religious narratives, we can retrieve and amplify their contributions by reinterpreting traditional narratives to emphasize the roles of female characters. In the process, we can situate these narratives within their social contexts, thereby shedding light on women’s nuanced and multifaceted positions within the social and spiritual fabric of their societies. Full article

The authors’ intention is to conduct an analysis utilizing a purely conceptual, literary content-based investigation of two hermeneutical dimensions associated with work motivation in the public service sector. Specifically, the study focuses on public school teachers in the Italian context due to the neglected way in which they matured in literary production and the hostile work environment brought about by the numerous reforms in a kind of heterogenesis of ends. Through the use of aphorisms and metaphors, after a literature review, gap identification and a content-based analysis, the authors aim to identify an approach that can anthropologically serve as a synthesis formula for workers who are emotionally and intensely invested in their professional practice. Specifically, this includes professions, including educational ones, that are subjected to high exposure to emotional labor (EL). The authors have identified two dimensions: one oriented towards the concept of gift and the other towards possession for integrating the demand–resource model (DRM). To support this analysis, the seminal research work of Belk will be utilized as a reference in the wide range of literary production on the give-and-take approach, according to Schaufeli and Grant. Furthermore, empirical data from previous research will be used to functionally explain how sense-making, when combined with the dynamics of gift–possession, can act as a factor of resilience for professions that hold significant emotional value. In this way, the authors shape a perspective on the theoretical paradigm toward the performance measurement and management system under the lens of New Public Management reform, considering the grand challenges inherent in the educational area by identifying organizational behavioral levers for justifying high motivation-driven actions in an underestimated job segment. In this way, the greatest contribution lies in the possibility of defining a reference framework to expand the DRM in application to the clarification of the foundations inherent in resilience behaviors implemented by educational professions in the specific reference context. The main result would precisely be the ability of the latter to cope with hostile contexts through the dynamics of gift and possession that promote work resilience through the attribution of meaning and identity to the job. These perspectives are useful for deepening the understanding of performance measurement and management approaches. Full article

This article develops a hermeneutic study of Heidegger’s text The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead”. We attempt to read Heidegger’s remarks in the context of the “period of transition” that, according to Nietzsche, is occurring in the history of western thought and culture. This essay unfolds in the following manner: beginning with Heidegger’s contention that Nietzsche’s philosophy is the “fulfilment” of Platonism, we go over the problem of nihilism in relation to the metaphysics of the will to power, which for Heidegger requires revising Cartesian subjectivity in search of a new ontology. Heidegger’s critique of modernity encompasses a narrative that goes from “Plato” to “Nietzsche”, leading to a reconsideration of the notions of art and truth. Finally, we attempt to interpret the meaning of the “madman’s lament” voicing the passing of God. Full article

Tchaikovsky enjoyed composing Yevgeni Onegin. He expressed his fulfillment in a famous letter to Sergey Taneyev. What could his enthusiasm convey about the content of the project? Music criticism has taken Tchaikovsky’s words as proof for the thesis that the opera is connected to autobiographical circumstances. In this mode of thinking, the quality of Tchaikovsky’s music is the result of the composer’s identification with the subject matter. Despite the objection of several Tchaikovsky scholars, the autobiographical paradigm remains very much alive in the reception of Tchaikovsky’s music. As an alternative, Tchaikovsky scholarship has explored a hermeneutical approach that would link his music to its context in Russian society and culture. In this paper, I present another possible reaction to Tchaikovsky’s statement: an exploration of the composer’s approach to musical characterization. Analysis of some key scenes reveals that the definition of characters and situations by musical means is more precise than standard interpretations of the opera would concede. This discovery may lead to a new assessment of characterization as a critical tool to refine the definition of Tchaikovsky’s position in European music history. The method may be applied to examples outside his operatic output, such as Serenade for Strings and the Fifth Symphony. Full article

The search for knowledge has been central to the Islamic tradition from its inception in the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (aḥādīth). The injunctions to obtain knowledge and contemplate the signs of God in all things undergird a culture of ultimate questions in which there was an underlying epistemic unity among all fields of knowledge, from the religious sciences to the intellectual sciences to the natural sciences. Having lost sight of the underlying metaphysic that provides this epistemic unity, many thinkers in the modern period read the classical Islamic texts independently of the cognitive cartography and hierarchy of which they are a part. This approach leads to further misunderstandings and thus to a sense of hermeneutical gloom and epistemic subordination characteristic of coloniality. Postcolonial theory provides effective tools for diagnosing the process by which this epistemic erosion produces ideologically and epistemically conscripted subjects. But as it, too, arises from within a secular frame, it is only by understanding the cognitive cartography of the sciences within Islam that epistemic confidence and sovereignty can be reinstated. Full article

In today’s postcritical environment, the philosophical disciplines have at times acquired a negative reputation for abstraction, relativity and impracticability. While indispensable to the modern university curriculum, the meaning and utility of the philosophical enterprise continues to register ambivalently in modern popular consciousness. In this article, I challenge this popular assumption with a case study in philosophical interpretation, by applying the hermeneutics of German existentialist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to issues of practical religious life. Within a life-context of anxiety over intellectual finitude and its ensuing projections, I demonstrate how the innovative sapiential reading of Christ by medieval Franciscan theologian Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (c. 1217–1274) supplies a productive intervention to ensure a new state-of-mind. This new state-of-mind arising from a new mode of understanding and being-in-the-world, amounts to a transmutation of the Heideggerian hermeneutic mode in the light of biblical truth. Bonaventure’s threefold way of Christological exegesis serves as a requisite framework in which to practically redeploy the Heideggerian way of understanding towards a positive existential end. Full article

This work examines the environmental challenges occasioned by Samaria’s ‘imperial singleness’ in prophet Hosea’s text from an African perspective. The interaction between the ‘seat of power’ in Samaria and imperial forces in Hosea’s time appears to have negatively influenced Israel’s attitude towards land use (Hos 12:1, 2; 1 Ki 21:1–28; 2 Ki 9:26). Such interface becomes evident in a shift, by Samaria’s ‘seat of power’, from Yahweh’s prescribed land-use policy to those of their imperial masters—Assyria and Egypt. Despite Israel’s liberation from Egypt by Yahweh during the exodus (Hos 11:1), their susceptibility to treaty alliances with these imperial forces remains vivid in Hosea’s narrative (Hos 7:1–16; 12:1–2). Echoing the words of Ngwa, such an alliance seemingly classifies Samaria’s monarchy as a ‘localised imperial singularity’ and a ‘single hero’ as against the ‘communal oneness with the divine, humans and the earth itself’. This ‘localised imperial singleness’ and its effect on Israel’s land was subjected to a critical engagement premised on the principles of interconnectedness and the voice of the earth, while a combination of Mburu’s African Hermeneutics and Kavus’ Ecological Hermeneutics is employed for the purpose of critical decolonial discourse. Full article

Joel is one of the 12 minor prophets (dōdekaprophēton). His prophecy aims at calling the nation and people to repentance through emphasizing that the Day of the Lord (yōm ădȏnay) is at hand (3:1–5 [2:28–32]). The locust plague (ʾarbbeh) in Joel’s message—which recalls the insects that threaten to destroy crops and vegetation in Africa and beyond, but which can also be used as food and livestock feed and offer other benefits as well—could be interpreted as Joel’s prophetic sign that the great Day of the Lord is near (1:2–2:17). Throughout history, scholars, theologians, and exegetes of differing schools of thought and from numerous locations have offered various interpretations for Joel’s prophecy and subjected it to diverse Eurocentric and Americo-centric hermeneutical methods. This work, however, with its focus on Africa, takes a different approach. Drawing from the work of many African hermeneuticians, it reads Joel’s prophecy using the tools of African Biblical Hermeneutics (ABH), a post-colonial enterprise, in light of the decolonial turn. The article exegetes and theologically analyzes the narrative of the locust plague (ʾarbbeh) in Joel 1:2–7, within the context of Joel 1–3, with the hopes that it will be transformational and beneficial for African readers within their faith context. Full article

The problem of empire has been a key theme in Islamic Liberation Theology (ILT). However insightful, ILT’s engagement with the category of empire has generally presumed a particular colonial configuration in which Muslims are located on the receiving “end” of power, being occupied by an external, non-Muslim force. But what about the presence of Islam within settler colonies, in which voluntary Muslim migrants are structurally complicit in the ongoing disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples? Focusing on the Canadian context, I ask: How can we decolonise Islam in the settler colony? That is, how can Muslims address their own complicity with the settler colonial project, standing in solidarity with native peoples and revisiting their own faith tradition in the light of that praxis? I argue that decolonising Islam entails three hermeneutical moves: (I) gaining a critical understanding of the socio-historical context, namely, the history of empire on the land; (II) deconstructing the boundaries between “migrant” and “settler”, which actually serves to vindicate the former group, releasing them of accountability and responsibility; and (III) engaging in bold theological reflection on the Islamic tradition. This final theological step, I maintain, is a two-fold dynamic: expounding Islam as both a radical subject that decolonises and a problematic object requiring decolonisation. Full article

Scholarship on letters in modern Japanese literature typically describes their discursive transformation from objects of practical import to texts of literary significance in the late Meiji 30s and 40s, a transformation contemporaneous to and engendered by the sudden explosion of interest in autobiographical literary texts. Such an approach, however, unintentionally denigrates the complexity of late-Meiji era fiction’s negotiation with the epistolary discourse that flourished in this era. Seeking a broader engagement with this hitherto underexamined discourse, I take Tayama Katai’s (1872–1930) famous I-novel, The Quilt (1907), as a test case, arguing that the letters embedded there engage with the contemporary conversation on letters on four levels: content, linguistic style, subjectivity, and hermeneutics. I argue that, far from reaffirming the overlap between letters and literature, Katai’s text evinces a consistently oppositional stance toward contemporary epistolary dogma, problematizing, interrogating, and subverting it at every turn. I conclude by proposing that this defiant stance toward typical conceptualizations of the letter is common to other I-novels of the period, suggesting that the I-novel was only born through a conspicuous disavowal of the letter form. Full article

Wittgenstein mentions “forms of life” only on a limited number of occasions in his writings; however, this concept is at the core of his approach to language, as the vast literature on the subject shows. My aim in this paper is neither to adjudicate which of the many competing interpretations of “forms of life” is correct nor to propose a new one. I start with a methodological take on this notion and test it by applying it to a specific case. In my view, the notion of forms of life is a methodological tool that Wittgenstein uses to draw attention to the embeddedness of language in our lives and practices. This reading, I suggest, allows us to oppose those who want to see in Wittgenstein a conservative thinker, based on his remark on forms of life as “the given” that must be accepted. In particular, it becomes possible to put his notion to use in the study of linguistic and social change. Hence, I propose as an example the case of innovative language games in trans communities. In this context, the notion of forms of life enables us to see with more clarity how linguistic change occurs, which also helps us better understand phenomena such as disagreement, conflict, and hermeneutical injustice. Full article

Many contemporary studies approach Mahdism from a political-science orientation or historical perspective, as the evidence is marshalled from the influential Mahdist movement in Islamic history—Abbasids, Fatimids, Muwahhids, Sudanese Mahdists, and so on. As such, it can be seen that there has been a lack of discourse as regards abstraction, particularly concerning the literary structure of Mahdī ḥadīth. This paper explores a panoramic view of ḥadīth commentaries in order to understand their commentarial production on apocalyptic questions, specifically focusing on the subject of Mahdī within this trend of Sunni ḥadīth scholarship. Ḥadīth commentaries are meant to bridge the gap in space and time between Prophetic words or teachings and the actual world of the reader. Hence, this study provides a brief survey of the documentation of Mahdī ḥadīth, starting with the classical Sunnite ḥadīth compendia of the second century of Hijrah. The material has been drawn from ḥadīth compendia, topical ḥadīth works, sīrah literature, classical-to-modern ḥadīth commentaries, and other theological writings and has been balanced when feasible with details (or lack thereof) contained in the Quran. Advocators have always adopted and adjusted their hermeneutics in order to answer challenges posed by deniers of Mahdī ḥadīth. Regardless of how exactly these strategies, attitudes, and uses arose, it is safe to assume that these scholars undertook their work out of professional vocation in addition to religious devotion. Eventually, ḥadīth commentaries found their place in the theological discourse according to orientations and operations of eschatology, which to a certain extent reflect classical, medieval, or contemporary attitudes toward the meaning and relevance of Mahdī ḥadīth. Full article

The authors have made an attempt in this case study, which is based on ‘subjective’ travel and existence experiences, for the indispensable separation of technical accessibility and fundamental or ‘deep’ accessibility—in both interpretation and application—and then to reconsider these concepts in their special philosophy-centred study, which is at the same time built on empirical inquiries and analyses. This is in line with a series of their publications in high-class periodicals. The authors are aware and understand at first sight that this hybrid analysis method has several shortcomings concerning objectivity expected by the academic community, and also concerning the verification of the findings with exact data. Nevertheless, they are convinced that in today’s world of transdisciplinarity, subjective and objective viewpoints are no longer dimensions mutually excluding each other in research. Accordingly, the ‘artificially’ created boundaries between ontological and epistemological philosophical approaches are not of substantial character either. In fact, their very necessity and even their existence can be questioned at certain types of applications (e.g., hermeneutical and Buddhist analytics). The experiences gained and analyses made by the authors make it clear that technical accessibility, and the interpretation and implementation of fundamental accessibility, as well as the control of these by the actual users, are still hindered by several obstacles. Additionally, the existence or lack of fundamental accessibility is a more significant issue than the mere fact of providing accessibility by technical solutions. Last but not least, it should be remarked that it is just the spirit of fundamental accessibility and its implementation in the real world that is capable of mostly meeting the personal needs for accessibility, which seems to be partially impossible. The paper is hermeneutic in nature, so it seeks to understand and interpret a phenomenon, and not to causally explain something. Accordingly, the reported data (both subjective and objective facts) serve the purpose of hermeneutics and not that of providing empirical proof. Full article