Phenomenology & Hermeneutics Flashcards
Husserl, Gadamer, Heidegger
Exegesis
(from the Greek “to lead out”) is a critical
explanation / interpretation of the Bible.
Exegesis focused
on the written text
Hermeneutics is
a “classical discipline concerned
with the art of understanding texts.”
Typological reading
g interprets Old Testament events
as prefiguring the New Testament events.
A typological theory of poetry…
rests on the idea that
great poems are not random in structure, but are
both meaningful and purposeful.
Scripture operates on four levels of meaning.
1) literal (or historical); 2)
te allegorical; 3) tropological (or moral); and
4) anagogical (from Greek anagoge, meaning
“elevation, spiritual or mystical
enlightenment”).
the literal or historical level refers
to the event
itself;
the allegorical level relates
the literal event to
events in the New Testament;
the moral level refers to
the fate of the individual
soul;
the anagogical level refers to
universal history
and eschatology.
Modern hermeneutics, as a theory of
interpretation
has its philosophical roots in
phenomenology.
Phenomenology is
a school of philosophy which
studies the world’s phenomena as perceived by
the consciousness.
Phenomenology is concerned
with the
examination of consciousness.
Husserl
developed
phenomenology as a
philosophical method. The phenomenological
premise questions
our assumptions
about the world.
Phenomenology is the study of
the essential
structures of experience.
Husserl was interested in
what makes our
experience, our knowledge of objects possible,
what makes the necessary presuppositions of
experience possible.
Consciousness is
intentional (i.e. oriented towards
the world); it is a consciousness of something.
Phenomenology focuses on the issue of
perception
(i.e. the relationship between the individual
consciousness and the world).
Intentional consciousness is consciousness in
relation
to the Other (e.g. things of the world,
human beings, etc.).
In phenomenological reasoning
consciousness
constitutes the world and the world constitutes
consciousness.
Constituting
denotes a process in which
consciousness not only reflects creation, but also
participates in it.
The body is a meeting place for
self and the Other
(i.e. to be corporeal is to exist with others, to
understand one’s freedom and its limits).
The Other is also experienced
as a bodily manifestation.
Phenomenological reduction or epoche
Greek
epekhein “to pause, take up a position,” from epi-
“on” + ekhein “to hold.” - i.e. phenomenology
brackets off all preconceived ideas about the nature
of the world, suspends all judgment and simply
seeks to describe objects of experience.
Phenomenology analyses
the immanent
consciousness (cf. Formalism and Structuralism
approach texts as an immanent structures).
Phenomenology suspends objective relations…
and
studies intentional, rather than empirical objects.
Phenomenological analysis is concerned with
the
essences of the human experience of the world,
not the existence of things.
To understand a phenomenon is to….
understand
what is essential and unchanging about it.
Phenomenology aims to
return to the world as it is
before it is contaminated by either the categories
of scientific inquiry or the psychological
assumptions of the scientist.
Phenomenological reduction
brackets off our
assumptions about the world and inquires back
into consciousness.
Phenomenological determination of meaning
is
always tentative, incomplete.
Phenomenology is concerned
with possible human
experiences by holding universality and
particularity in tension.
In Derridean terms, phenomenology is logocentric
because
it is oriented towards essential meaning.
Phenomenological analysis
lays bare the deep
structures of the human mind and the
phenomena they perceive.
