Recent Event Highlights: The Ontological Turn-Heideggar & Gadamer, and 11 more...
Created by lindyljohnson on Oct 10, 2011
Last updated: 10/12/11 at 12:54 PM
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Stuart Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. (Hegemony, in Gramscian theory, refers to the cultural production of 'consent' as opposed to 'coercion'.)
For Hall, culture is not something to simply appreciate or study, but a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled."[8]
Hall has become one of the main proponents of reception theory. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hall_(cultural_theorist)
Gadamer's philosophical project was to elaborate on the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics", which Heidegger initiated but never dealt with at length.
Gadamer's goal was to uncover the nature of human understanding. He was critical of two approaches to the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). On the one hand, he was critical of modern approaches to humanities that modelled themselves on the natural sciences (and thus on rigorous scientific methods). On the other hand, he took issue with the traditional German approach to the humanities, represented for instance by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, which believed that correctly interpreting a text meant recovering the original intention of the author who wrote it.
In contrast to both of these positions, Gadamer argued that people have a 'historically effected consciousness' and that they are embedded in the particular history and culture that shaped them. Thus interpreting a text involves a fusion of horizons where the scholar finds the ways that the text's history articulates with their own background.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Georg_Gadamer
His writings prior to 1960 were in the tradition of existential phenomenology. But during the 1960s Ricoeur concluded that to study human reality he had to combine phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. He wrote, “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/#3
Semiology is the study of signs. Barthes was specifically interested in nonverbal signs.
Mead's research question: "Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?"
To answer this question, she conducted her study among a small group of Samoans — a village of 600 people on the island of Ta‘u — in which she got to know, live with, observe, and interview through an interpreter 68 young women between the ages of 9 and 20.
She concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood — adolescence — in Samoa was a smooth transition and not marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion seen in the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead#Coming_of_Age_in_Samoa
Now hermeneutics is not only about symbolic communication. Its area is even more fundamental: that of human life and existence as such. It is in this form, as an interrogation into the deepest conditions for symbolic interaction and culture in general, that hermeneutics has provided the critical horizon for many of the most intriguing discussions of contemporary philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/
In Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey begins to make his case for an interpretative or hermeneutic approach to historically oriented human studies, the Geisteswissenschaften, roughly all of the humanities and the social sciences including history.
http://oceanflynn.wordpress.com/homepage/timelines/timeline-of-hermeneutics/
1. Interpretation of immediate consequences 2. Psychological intepretation of motives 3. Social and Cultural interpretations 4. Moral and Ethical interpretations From Mindful Inquiry in Social Research
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was a German theologian and philosopher known for his attempt to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant orthodoxy. He also became influential in the evolution of Higher Criticism. His work also forms part of the foundation of the modern field of hermeneutics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Schleiermacher
The term ‘hermeneutics’ which means translate, interpret, make intelligible (Mautner 1997: 248) can be traced to Dannhauer in c. 1650 who classified texts in three categories: sacred, legal and literary. From a theological perspective the goal was to provide a correct interpretation, from the legal perspective, an authoritative statement
1440 The discipline of hermeneutics emerged with the new humanist education of the 15th century as a historical and critical methodology for analyzing texts.
In the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hermeneutics emerges as a crucial branch of Biblical studies.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/
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