Nicholas Davey (Professor Emeritus, University of Dundee)
4:30pm, Wednesday 4 December
Dalhousie Building, Room 2F15,
University of Dundee
A seminar for the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy.
Funded by the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
All welcome.
Link for online streaming on Teams:
Abstract
Unless hermeneutical thinking can establish a robust philosophical justification for what is subjectively experienced by each of us as meaningful, its passionate advocacy of educative formation and transformation is empty nonsense. This issue will discussed in relation to three philosophical approaches to subjectivity:
- It is essentially a world of relationships; under certain conditions it has a differing aspect from every point; its being is essentially different from every point: it presses upon every point, every point resists it – and the sum of these is one every case quite incongruent. ( FN. WM 568)
- The apparent objective character of things: could it not be merely a difference of degree within the subjective? – that perhaps that which changes slowly presents itself to us as “objective”, enduring, being, “in-itself” – that the objective is only a false concept of a genus and an antithesis within the subjective? (FN WM 556)
- All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given, what with Hegel we call “substance,” because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions (…) This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it. ( HGG TM 302)
Bio
Nicholas Davey is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. A leading figure in philosophical hermeneutics, he is author of numerous articles and book chapters, and the books Negative Hermeneutics and the Question of Practice (Bloomsbury, 2023), Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer (EUP, 2013), and Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (SUNY, 2007).