Medieval Exegesis and the Origin of Hermeneutics

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 328-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Ocker

Dilthey, in his famous essay, ‘Die Enstehung der Hermeneutik’, first published in 1900, taught us that Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the mid sixteenth-century Lutheran theologian, was the author of the first significant treatise on hermeneutics. Conceding a classic Protestant opinion once articulated by Flacius, he consigned medieval interpretation to what must have seemed a justified oblivion: he simply ignored the period between Origen and John Calvin. Calvin, Flacius, and especially Friedrich Schleiermacher were the main contributors to the rediscovery of the interpretive force of history and language, which Dilthey surely felt was best appreciated by his own philosophy of culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer later tried to show that Dilthey himself was weak on language and misinformed about history, falling prey to the movement that Gadamer opprobriously called ‘historicism’. Gadamer's own view of the development of hermeneutics—with its subjection of historical knowledge to ‘our own present horizon of understanding’, its accent on language, and its debt to Martin Heidegger—shifted the chronology of hermeneutics even closer to the present According to Gadamer, the ‘hermeneutic problem’ was specifically created by the alienation of exegesis and understanding from ‘application’, the importance of which was discovered only by Romantic philosophy and best redressed with the help of a language-obsessed philosophy of being. But as was the case for Dilthey, the crucial moment in the development of hermeneutics remained the discovery of the role of language in ‘meaning’, in the broadest sense, so that texts could only be understood in the grand context of a philosophy of life or, in Gadamerian terms, in the context of a philosophy that functioned as present interpretation.

Author(s):  
Andrus Tool

Wilhelm Dilthey initially studied theology in Germany but later shifted to philosophy and history. He tackled the specific nature of human sciences in relation to natural sciences and initiated a debate on the connection between understanding and explanation in scientific knowledge. In addition to his own school, he exerted influence on fellow philosophers Martin Heidegger, Helmuth Plessner, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. This chapter explores the formation of Dilthey’s philosophical views, including the principle of phenomenality, the theory of human sciences, and the role of inner experience as the main source of cognition in human sciences. It also discusses his later work and his arguments concerning empirical factuality, congealed objectivity, and processual reality. Finally, the chapter examines how ideas similar to those of Dilthey have influenced organizational culture and dynamics.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Magalde FERREIRA (UMESP)

O artigo tem por objetivo apresentar as principais características da estreita relaçãoentre hermenêutica e vida que surgiu no final do século XIX e se manteve até meados do século passado, culminando no deslocamento do elemento textual, outrora a característica hermenêutica mais evidente. Com base nestes postulados, indicaremos de que modo esta evolução ocorreu primeiramente numa vertente ainda epistemológica com base no pensamento de Friedrich Schleiermacher e Wilhelm Dilthey para, num segundo momento, abordá-la sob a ótica ontológica-existencial de Martin Heidegger e Hans-Georg Gadamer.


2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
I.A. Nell

Calvin as “practical theologian”: the contribution of a theodramatic paradigmIn order to ask the question about the role and place of a specific discipline (in this case Practical Theology), one must realise where one comes from. This article seeks to answer the question about the role of Practical Theology within the field of theology in conversation with some perspectives offered by the sixteenth-century reformer, John Calvin. It is argued that Calvin lived in a century that scholars regard as one of the golden periods in which the world of the arts and theatre flourished. Hence Calvin’s age was characterised by a dramatic vision of human existence and such a vision also had an impact on his own theological thinking. Against this backdrop, the article engages the question of the role and place of practical theology by proposing a theodramatic approach in which the possibilities that the notion of “re-dramatisation” holds, come to the fore.


Cultural code ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 30-37
Author(s):  
MARIYA PETROVNA LAPTEVA ◽  

The article continues the author's series of publications on the terminological apparatus of the historian. The problems of humanitarian science cannot have "final solutions". F.R.Ankersmith paid attention to the fact that the attitude to the role of metaphors knows not onli "ups" but also "downs". Exploring aspects of the conceptual arsenal associated with the explicit use of the metaphor. "Implicit use" refers to those semantic situations when a historian or another humanist enters into a kind of dialogue with other sciences, carrying out terminological borrowing. Since the semantic content of the term changes in this case, then, in essence, a metaphorical action takes place that does not require a special name. The article contains, the author's reflection on the circumstances and features of the use of metaphors. The author finds out how and why historiography becomes metaphorical. Referring to specialists who developed the cognitive basis of the theory of metaphor, the author analyzes different traditions of understanding what metaphor is. There is a search for a positive sense of metaphor usage with some ambiguity. Since the metaphor creates a new meaning of the word, its cognitive significance becomes unquestionable. By citing examples of various uses of metaphors in the texts of historians, the author shows how a metaphor helps clarify the uniqueness of historical situations.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
KAARLO HAVU

Abstract The article analyses the emergence of decorum (appropriateness) as a central concept of rhetorical theory in the early sixteenth-century writings of Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives. In rhetorical theory, decorum shifted the emphasis from formulaic rules to their creative application in concrete cases. In doing so, it emphasized a close analysis of the rhetorical situation (above all the preferences of the audience) and underscored the persuasive possibilities of civil conversation as opposed to passionate, adversarial rhetoric. The article argues that the stress put on decorum in early sixteenth-century theory is not just an internal development in the history of rhetoric but linked to far wider questions concerning the role of rhetoric in religious and secular lives. Decorum appears as a solution both to the divisiveness of language in the context of the Reformation and dynastic warfare of the early sixteenth century and as an adaptation of the republican tradition of political rhetoric to a changed, monarchical context. Erasmus and Vives maintained that decorum not only suppressed destructive passions and discord, but that it was only through polite and civil rhetoric (or conversation) that a truly effective persuasion was possible in a vast array of contexts.


1976 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 211-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton

WHEN on the previous two occasions I discussed Parliament and Council as political centres, as institutions capable of assisting or undermining stability in the nation, I had to draw attention to quite a few unanswered questions. However, I also found a large amount of well established knowledge on which to rely. Now, in considering the role of the King's or Queen's Court, I stand more baffled than ever, more deserted. We all know that there was a Court, and we all use the term with frequent ease, but we seem to have taken it so much for granted that we have done almost nothing to investigate it seriously. Lavish descriptions abound of lavish occasions, both in the journalism of the sixteenth century and in the history books, but the sort of study which could really tell us what it was, what part it played in affairs, and even how things went there for this or that person, seems to be confined to a few important articles. At times it has all the appearance of a fully fledged institution; at others it seems to be no more than a convenient conceptual piece of shorthand, covering certain people, certain behaviour, certain attitudes. As so often, the shadows of the seventeenth century stretch back into the sixteenth, to obscure our vision. Analysts of the reigns of the first two Stuarts, endeavouring to explain the political troubles of that age, increasingly concentrate upon an alleged conflict between the Court and the Country; and so we are tempted, once again, to seek the prehistory of the ever interesting topic in the age of Elizabeth or even Henry VIII.


Nuncius ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Valleriani

The paper aims to show how sixteenth century hydraulic and pneumatic engineers appropriated ancient science and technology – codified in the text of Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatics – to enter into scientific discourse, for instance, with natural philosophers. They drew on the logical structure, content and narrative style passed down from antiquity to generate and codify their own theoretical approach and to document their new technological achievements. They did so by using the form of commented and enlarged editions, just as Aristotelian natural philosophers had been doing for centuries. The argument aims to detail the exact role of ancient science and the process of transformation it underwent during the early modern period. In particular, it aims to show how pneumatic engineers first tested the ancient technology codified by Hero while carrying out their own practical activities. Once these tests were successfully concluded, in the spirit of early modern humanism they finally presented these activities as being associated with the work of their discipline’s most authoritative author, Hero of Alexandria, whose technology was tested during the construction of the hydraulic and pneumatic system of the garden of Pratolino.


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