10.13125/CH/5456
application/pdf
2533-1825
5456
2
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-28964
Mirela Oliva
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Critical Hermeneutics
Editors' Introduction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch
6
Articles
2023-01-26
2023-01-26
2023-01-27
2023-01-27
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1
Mirela Oliva
2022
10.13125/CH/5456
I
2533-1825
2
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urn:nbn:it:unica-28964
Editors' Introduction
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/download/5456/5356
6
Critical Hermeneutics, 6(2) (2022)
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy
http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/index
ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/5456




                             Editors’ Introduction




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 purpose of hermeneutics to
formulate fundamental philosophical questions in light of human historical
experience. Opposed to relativism, veritative hermeneutics and hermeneutic
realism focus on truth, objectivity, the structure of reality, normativity, and
meaning. The issue publishes contributions of this track’s pioneers (Gaspare
Mura – veritative hermeneutics, Günter Figal, and Anton Friedrich Koch –
hermeneutic realism) as well as authors that explore this track from various
perspectives:      ethics,     personalism,      normativity,   testimony,   Biblical
hermeneutics and Jewish thought, religious language, meaning. In this
introduction, we will first present the authors working on veritative
hermeneutics, then those working on hermeneutic realism.
      Hermeneutics has often been identified with relativism and weak
thought and dubbed adverse to truth. Notwithstanding these ideas, the very
task of Hermes is truthfully to interpret, not to betray. This relationship
between Logos and truth is crucial for hermeneutics since its inception in
Greek philosophy. Veritative hermeneutics aims at recovering this truth
dimension of hermeneutics by inquiring into metaphysical themes, the
relationship between truth and history, and the question of truth in
interpretation. This approach highlights the complexity of truth, non-
Editors’ Introduction




reducible to a mere logical-grammatical vision of adaequatio but based on
the experience of historical and existential disclosure. For this reason,
veritative hermeneutics conceives of truth in connection with the notion of
Being and the ontology of language. It continues a longstanding tradition
shaped by some crucial moments: Plato’s and Aristotle’s ontology of
language, the medieval philosophy of truth, language, and Being, the
modern Protestant hermeneutics of the Scripture, Dilthey’s hermeneutics of
life   and historical experience,    Heidegger’s   hermeneutics of facticity,
Gadamer’s revival of phronesis, Betti’s interpretation theory, and Ricoeur’s
hermeneutics of symbols.
       Gaspare Mura, the pioneer of veritative hermeneutics, elaborated in
his widely esteemed life-long work a vision of hermeneutics as a philosophy
of truth understood multi-dimensionally. Indeed, for Mura, hermeneutics
must connect diverse epistemological fields and thus unify the natural and
human sciences. A robust notion of truth does not benefit from disciplinary
dichotomies but from a holistic approach. Mura’s references range from
medieval philosophy (Augustine) to Italian humanism (Vico, Betti).
       The contribution of Gaspare Mura for this issue, titled “Truth and
History in Vico and Betti. The Historical and Theoretical Foundation of
Veritative Hermeneutics” explores the relationship between truth and
history in Vico and Betti. For Mura, this relationship constitutes the ground
of veritative hermeneutics. Vico’s interpretation of the historical factum and
Betti’s elaboration of non-subjectivist criteria of understanding are the
pillars of veritative hermeneutics in opposition to the weak thought that
appeared in the twentieth century.
       The article of Cristiana Freni, “The Person in Gaspare Mura’s
Hermeneutics: A Critical Study”, analizza Gaspare Mura’s personalism. First,
it highlights Mura’s sources: Armando Rigobello, Battista Mondin, Mounier,
and Ricoeur. Second, it shows how Mura’s personalist holism rests on the
hypostatical tradition and relational personalism. Finally, it explores how
Mura’s personalism contributes to contemporary anthropological debates.




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                                                      Critical Hermeneutics, 6(2) (2022)




     Tiziano    Conti’s   paper,    “Biblical   Hermeneutics     in   Paul   Ricoeur:
Philosophy     Encountering   the    I   Am     Who   I   Am”   analyzes     Ricoeur’s
interpretation of one of most famous and discussed passages in the Hebrew
Bible, “I am who I am”. Conti shows how Ricoeur connects this passage
with a passage in the Gospel of John: “God is Love”. Thus, God’s
metaphysical perfection comes to light not through a tautological approach
or via negationis but through the lens of agape.
     The article of Patrizia Manganaro, titled “Doing Truth. Intentional-
performative Realism in the Religious Language”, questions the relationship
between two complementary approaches to language: one that considers
the linguistic act an expression of language and one that focuses on the
performative intentionality of language, especially religious language.
Finally, Manganaro’s study shows how veritative hermeneutics can bridge
analytic and continental philosophy.
     The contribution of Irene Kajon, titled “An Oven Like a Snake:
Hermeneutics and Truth In Some Jewish Sources”, reflects on the
interpretative conflict in the Talmud, Bava Metzia, regarding the purity or
impurity of the oven of akhnai, that is, of the snake. The dialectical
discussion among Rabbi Eliezer, a prophet and defensor of the oven’s
purity, and his opponents highlights the fundamental tenets of veritative
hermeneutics.
     The second part of this special issue turns to hermeneutic realism. In
this field, the groundbreaking works of Günter Figal and Anton Friedrich
Koch have oriented hermeneutics toward objectivity and the relationship
between the subject and reality. In his Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and
Philosophy (published in German in 2006 and translated into English in
2010, and Italian in 2012), Figal set up a realist hermeneutic paradigm that
examines the fundamental features of reality: space, time, world, life,
language, and freedom. In this paradigm, hermeneutics does not study only
the conditions and structures of understanding but also the objects that
give themselves to interpretation. Figal develops his analysis of objectivity
in dialogue with the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition of Husserl,




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Editors’ Introduction




Heidegger, and Gadamer, and with the classical tradition of Plato and
Aristotle.
      In the same realist vein, Anton Friedrich Koch published his 2016
monograph Hermeneutischer Realismus, which claims the readability of
things in relation to the interpretative subject. Following the analytic
tradition, Koch includes the findings of science but underlines the belonging
of things and the subject to the lifeworld. Even though reality exists
independently of us, its intelligibility depends on the human subject. The
latter is not an abstract intellect but a living being located in a certain space
and time. Koch refers mainly to the analytic tradition and the existential
thought of Heidegger.
      Günter     Figal’s   contribution   to   this   issue,   titled   “The   Task   of
Hermeneutics”, presents, in nuce, a hermeneutic program focused on the
objects of interpretation and understanding. It proves that interpretative
normativity does not rest on the conditions of understanding but on the
objects themselves. Figal investigates how these objects constitute the
measure of adequacy or inadequacy of interpretation. His proposal places
the “primordial meaning” of the object at the core of hermeneutic
normativity.
      The paper of Anton Friedrich Koch, titled “Our Common Extended
Consciousness and the Readability of Things: Two Theses of Hermeneutic
Realism”, elaborates on a hermeneutic realism based on what the author
calls “common extended consciousness”. Koch identifies two sides of this
consciousness: the sensory, qualitative consciousness and the discursive,
intentional consciousness. Regarding the first, all human beings share an
infinite spatiotemporal field of consciousness, even though it is oriented
differently for each person. Thanks to this field, we can reach an agreement
about things. In the second case, Koch shows that language makes possible
our knowledge of objects, which give themselves as ur-tokens of their
names, phenomenal “this-such” representations of them, and elementary
sentences about them.




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                                                  Critical Hermeneutics, 6(2) (2022)




     Gert-Jan van der Heiden’s contribution, titled “Witnessing, Truth, and
Realism: A Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Approach”, elaborates on a
hermeneutic realism that revisits Aristotle’s model of theoria from the
perspective of human testimony. First, Van der Heiden presents the realist
critiques that accuse hermeneutics of correlationism and relativism. To
address these critiques, he then examines two modes of understanding the
real and the true: negative and affirmative. Finally, the article closes with
the role of language as a place of truth.
     The article by Theodore George, titled “Is Hermeneutic Realistic? On
the Normative Orientation toward Plurality” takes a realist approach to the
pluralist vocation of hermeneutics. While admitting that hermeneutics
entails a plurality of interpretations, George claims that this plurality rests
on a community of interests and concerns. The postmodern paradigm that
absolutizes plurality runs the danger of hermeneutic isolation in which each
of us remains separated from the others. To safeguard plurality, George
proposes the communal basis of dialogue as a normative criterion.
     Mirela Oliva’s paper, titled “Realist Meaning”, accounts for a realist
notion of meaning that includes all things, not only language. Oliva shows
that the universalization of meaning results from a historical process that
started   with   medieval   Biblical   hermeneutics,   continued     in   German
Protestant hermeneutics, up to contemporary hermeneutics, and crossed
into analytic philosophy. The meaning of a thing entails its properties,
relationship with other things, the knowing subject, and, ultimately, the
world. Thus meaning means the essence, origin, purpose, causation, value,
or importance of something. Finally, Oliva examines how this polysemy can
unify various fields of reality and philosophical disciplines. She refers to
Nozick’s definition of meaning, which resembles the hermeneutics of
meaning.
     The article of Andrea Fiore, “Pragmatism, Realism and Hermeneutics:
Dewey and Familiarity as a Tool of Interpretation”, shows how Dewey’s
notion of familiarity contributes to the interpretation of reality. Fiore claims
that pragmatism and hermeneutics share the realist effort to open access to




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Editors’ Introduction




reality. The terms “familiarity”, “familiar”, “familiarize”, and their antonyms,
“unknown”, and “strange”, reveal the relationship between reality and the
human being.




                                                               Cristiana Freni
                                                         Theodore D. George
                                                                  Mirela Oliva




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