This week’s book spotlight is, Inheriting Gadamer: New Directions in Philosophical Hermeneutics, edited by Georgia Warnke (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). The book has four parts: 1) Critique and Causality, 2) Hermeneutics and Openness, 3) Place, Play and the Body, and 4) Science, Medicine, and Biotechnology. Chapter contributors include Santiago Zabala, “The Anarchy of Hermeneutics: Interpretation as a Vital Practice,” Georgia Warnke, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Politics of Memory,” Jeff Malpas, “Place and Hermeneutics: Towards a Topology of Understanding,” and Lauren Swayne Barthold, “If Enhancement is the Answer, What is the Question?”
Description from the back book cover
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics – one of the seminal philosophies of the 20th century – has had a profound influence on a wide array of fields, including classical philology, theology, the philosophy of the social sciences, literary theory, philosophy of law, critical social theory and the philosophy of art. This collection expands on some of these areas and takes his hermeneutics into yet new fields including narrative medicine, biotechnology, the politics of memory, the philosophy of place and the non-verbal language of the body. And, building on Gadamer’s well-known discussions with Heidegger, Habermas, and Derrida, Inheriting Gadamer sets him in dialogue with Mahatma Gandhi, Christine Korsgaard, Charles Mills and others. In these ways, the volume holds fast to a Gadamerian virtue: cultivating our important philosophical traditions while embracing the constant need to re-think their meaning in new circumstances and in relation to new knowledge.
