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Theodore George
Theodore George is Professor of Philosophy and Presidential Impact Fellow at Texas A&M University. He is the author of The Responsibility to Understand: Hermeneutical Contours of Ethical Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Tragedies of Spirit: Tracing Finitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology (State University of New York Press, 2006), and numerous articles and book chapters in his areas of expertise, including The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, “Hermeneutics.” He is co-ed. with Gert-Jan van der Heiden, The Gadamerian Mind in the Routledge Philosophical Minds series (Routledge, 2021), as well as co-ed. with Charles Bambach, Philosophers and their Poets: Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy Since Kant (State University of New York Press, 2019) and translator of Günter Figal, Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2010). His writings also include a work of poetry, Motherfisher: a haiku-story of grieving in the age of COVID (Alien Buddha Press, 2021).
George’s honorary appointments include Professor (Adjunct appointment), Faculty of Nursing, University of Calgary (2021–present) and Professor (Adjunct appointment), College of Fellows, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University (2016–2021). George is category editor, PhilPapers, “Hermeneutics,” / leaf editor “Hans-Georg Gadamer.” His research has been supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Fulbright Commission, the Goethe Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at the University of Freiburg, Germany, as well as at Texas A&M University by the Presidential Impact Fellows Program, the Rothrock Fellows Program, and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. He is a recipient of the Texas A&M Association of Former Students College of Liberal Arts Teaching Award.
Dr. George’s administrative and service contributions include two terms as Head of the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, Academic Program Review work in conjunction with Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board mandate, as well as peer-review work for granting agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, as well as for numerous presses and journals. He serves on advisory boards for journals and professional organizations in his areas of expertise, he is a former Director of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, and former President of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics. Dr. George also serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Brazos Valley Food Bank, Bryan, Texas.
Supervisors: Dennis Schmidt
Address: College Station, Texas, United States
George’s honorary appointments include Professor (Adjunct appointment), Faculty of Nursing, University of Calgary (2021–present) and Professor (Adjunct appointment), College of Fellows, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University (2016–2021). George is category editor, PhilPapers, “Hermeneutics,” / leaf editor “Hans-Georg Gadamer.” His research has been supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Fulbright Commission, the Goethe Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at the University of Freiburg, Germany, as well as at Texas A&M University by the Presidential Impact Fellows Program, the Rothrock Fellows Program, and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. He is a recipient of the Texas A&M Association of Former Students College of Liberal Arts Teaching Award.
Dr. George’s administrative and service contributions include two terms as Head of the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, Academic Program Review work in conjunction with Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board mandate, as well as peer-review work for granting agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, as well as for numerous presses and journals. He serves on advisory boards for journals and professional organizations in his areas of expertise, he is a former Director of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, and former President of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics. Dr. George also serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Brazos Valley Food Bank, Bryan, Texas.
Supervisors: Dennis Schmidt
Address: College Station, Texas, United States
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- 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 a new, ethically inflected approach to current debate within post-Gadamerian hermeneutics
- Extends his analysis to the practice of living and covers animals, art, literature and translation
Few topics have received broader attention within contemporary philosophy than that of responsibility. Theodore George makes a novel case for a distinctive sense of responsibility at stake in the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation.
He argues for the significance of this hermeneutical responsibility in the context of our relations with things, animals and others, as well as political solidarity and the formation of solidarities through the arts, literature and translation.
The Gadamerian Mind is a major survey of the fundamental aspects of Gadamer’s thought, with contributions from leading scholars of Gadamer and hermeneutics from around the world. Thirty-eight chapters are divided into six clear parts:
Overviews
Key Concepts
Historical Influences
Contemporary Encounters
Beyond Philosophy
Legacies and Questions.
Although Gadamer’s work addresses a remarkable range of topics, careful consideration is given throughout the volume to consistent concerns that orient his thought. Important in this respect is his relation to philosophers in the Western tradition, from Plato to Heidegger.
An indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching Gadamer, hermeneutics and the history of twentieth-century philosophy, The Gadamerian Mind will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as religion, literature, political theory and education.
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, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets’ contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition.
Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses.
“With its impressive range of both philosophers and poets, this volume opens up new avenues of thinking at the intersections of philosophy and poetry.” — Robert D. Metcalf, cotranslator of Martin Heidegger’s Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy
What I wish to show in this chapter is that Gadamer clarifies central tenets of his divergence from Heidegger indirectly, as it were by proxy, in reference to the legacy of German Idealism generally and to Hegel’s legacy in particular. As we shall see, Gadamer takes his point of departure from critical concerns about German Idealism. Gadamer suggests that German Idealism has left not only a broader legacy of alienation from art and history but also a philosophical legacy of subjective idealism that haunts even phenomenology. Yet, as Gadamer believes, this legacy of German Idealism does not exhaust the significance of Hegel. As I shall argue, Gadamer turns to Hegel in order to elucidate historico-lingusitic conditions of what the early Heidegger called ‘facticity.’ Thus, Gadamer’s integration of Hegel’s legacy into his philosophical hermeneutics, though often viewed as a retreat from Heidegger’s project of a ‘destruction’ of metaphysics, in fact proves to be the basis of his attempt to make Heidegger’s hermeneutics more radical.
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 the hermeneutics of the body in later essays concerned with health, medical science, and the art of healing. Specifically, I argue that Gadamer’s treatment of these themes recommends the body as an ineluctable aspect of what Heidegger referred to as the hermeneutics of facticity. In this, Gadamer suggests that the hermeneutics of facticity is characterized not only by the experience of language as this is transmitted historically, but, at the same time, by the embodied experience of pain. Through an analysis of references made by Gadamer in these later essays to the newborn child’s experience of the cry at birth, in particular, I argue that the hermeneutical significance of language, or logos, is always bound up with a rhythm, or rhythmos, of the body that is punctuated by pain.
Der Aufsatz untersucht Hans-Georg Gadamers Überlegungen zur hermeneutischen Bedeutung des Leibes. Diese Themenstellung mag überraschen, da Gadamer sich selbst vorwarf, die Hermeneutik des menschlichen Körpers vernachlässigt zu haben. Jedoch versuche ich zu zeigen, dass Gadamer in späten Aufsätzen, die sich mit Themen wie der Gesundheit, der Medizin und der Heilkunst beschäftigen, durchaus wichtige Beiträge zu einer hermeneutischen Theorie des Leibes liefert. Insbesondere argumentiere ich dafür, dass Gadamer den Leib als wesentlichen Aspekt dessen begreift, was Heidegger eine Hermeneutik der Faktizität genannt hat. Gadamer schlägt damit vor, nicht allein die Sprache in ihrer geschichtlichen Überlieferung, sondern auch die Leiberfahrung des Schmerzes als wesentlichen Bestandteil einer Hermeneutik der Faktizität zu begreifen. Die hermeneutische Beschreibung von Sprache oder logos ist immer mit einem Rhythmus, einem rhythmos verbunden, der jedoch im Schmerz unterbrochen wird.
- 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 a new, ethically inflected approach to current debate within post-Gadamerian hermeneutics
- Extends his analysis to the practice of living and covers animals, art, literature and translation
Few topics have received broader attention within contemporary philosophy than that of responsibility. Theodore George makes a novel case for a distinctive sense of responsibility at stake in the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation.
He argues for the significance of this hermeneutical responsibility in the context of our relations with things, animals and others, as well as political solidarity and the formation of solidarities through the arts, literature and translation.
The Gadamerian Mind is a major survey of the fundamental aspects of Gadamer’s thought, with contributions from leading scholars of Gadamer and hermeneutics from around the world. Thirty-eight chapters are divided into six clear parts:
Overviews
Key Concepts
Historical Influences
Contemporary Encounters
Beyond Philosophy
Legacies and Questions.
Although Gadamer’s work addresses a remarkable range of topics, careful consideration is given throughout the volume to consistent concerns that orient his thought. Important in this respect is his relation to philosophers in the Western tradition, from Plato to Heidegger.
An indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching Gadamer, hermeneutics and the history of twentieth-century philosophy, The Gadamerian Mind will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as religion, literature, political theory and education.
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, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets’ contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition.
Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses.
“With its impressive range of both philosophers and poets, this volume opens up new avenues of thinking at the intersections of philosophy and poetry.” — Robert D. Metcalf, cotranslator of Martin Heidegger’s Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy
What I wish to show in this chapter is that Gadamer clarifies central tenets of his divergence from Heidegger indirectly, as it were by proxy, in reference to the legacy of German Idealism generally and to Hegel’s legacy in particular. As we shall see, Gadamer takes his point of departure from critical concerns about German Idealism. Gadamer suggests that German Idealism has left not only a broader legacy of alienation from art and history but also a philosophical legacy of subjective idealism that haunts even phenomenology. Yet, as Gadamer believes, this legacy of German Idealism does not exhaust the significance of Hegel. As I shall argue, Gadamer turns to Hegel in order to elucidate historico-lingusitic conditions of what the early Heidegger called ‘facticity.’ Thus, Gadamer’s integration of Hegel’s legacy into his philosophical hermeneutics, though often viewed as a retreat from Heidegger’s project of a ‘destruction’ of metaphysics, in fact proves to be the basis of his attempt to make Heidegger’s hermeneutics more radical.
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 the hermeneutics of the body in later essays concerned with health, medical science, and the art of healing. Specifically, I argue that Gadamer’s treatment of these themes recommends the body as an ineluctable aspect of what Heidegger referred to as the hermeneutics of facticity. In this, Gadamer suggests that the hermeneutics of facticity is characterized not only by the experience of language as this is transmitted historically, but, at the same time, by the embodied experience of pain. Through an analysis of references made by Gadamer in these later essays to the newborn child’s experience of the cry at birth, in particular, I argue that the hermeneutical significance of language, or logos, is always bound up with a rhythm, or rhythmos, of the body that is punctuated by pain.
Der Aufsatz untersucht Hans-Georg Gadamers Überlegungen zur hermeneutischen Bedeutung des Leibes. Diese Themenstellung mag überraschen, da Gadamer sich selbst vorwarf, die Hermeneutik des menschlichen Körpers vernachlässigt zu haben. Jedoch versuche ich zu zeigen, dass Gadamer in späten Aufsätzen, die sich mit Themen wie der Gesundheit, der Medizin und der Heilkunst beschäftigen, durchaus wichtige Beiträge zu einer hermeneutischen Theorie des Leibes liefert. Insbesondere argumentiere ich dafür, dass Gadamer den Leib als wesentlichen Aspekt dessen begreift, was Heidegger eine Hermeneutik der Faktizität genannt hat. Gadamer schlägt damit vor, nicht allein die Sprache in ihrer geschichtlichen Überlieferung, sondern auch die Leiberfahrung des Schmerzes als wesentlichen Bestandteil einer Hermeneutik der Faktizität zu begreifen. Die hermeneutische Beschreibung von Sprache oder logos ist immer mit einem Rhythmus, einem rhythmos verbunden, der jedoch im Schmerz unterbrochen wird.