This course familiarizes students with the basic elements of philosophical hermeneutics. Specifically, it introduces students to how the categories of “text”, “interpretation”, and “understanding” are employed in the study of liberal arts in the contemporary academy. Through a selection of readings, it provides a historical overview of the development of philosophical hermeneutics which is indispensable for the understanding of contemporary philosophy. The scope of hermeneutics is “universal” because all acts of human understanding presume a hermeneutic dimension. As an academic subject, hermeneutics recovers and discloses other ways of understanding and experiencing truth (such as the truths of art, religion, and history), which the Enlightenment in essence rejected through its emphasis on method. Questions such as what does it mean to read a text; what are the relationships between readers and their worlds; what is a dialogue; what is the relationship between knowledge and interpretation; what is Gadamer’s rehabilitation of tradition and authority (contra Enlightenment reductive views) will be taken up in this course. It also highlights the significance of concepts such as pre-judgment or prejudice (praejudicium), fusion of horizons, hermeneutical experience, hermeneutical openness, and the need for dialogical engagement for genuine hermeneutic experience to occur. This course also introduces two most important disputes within the tradition of hermeneutics, namely “Gadamer-Derrida” and “Gadamer-Habermas” debates.
