All posts in Hermeneutics

One has no hesitation in correcting somebody whose age (a child), or station (such as a student), or lack of pretence to expertise render them entirely dependent on more learned interlocutors for sound knowledge. I can argue with somebody about Javanese astrology, but since I am perfectly ignorant on the topic, I have to concede…

The fundamental condition of interpretive practice is difference. Thus, every heremenutic that aims at — or takes as its founding premise — a correctness or identity (in the sense of a an interpretation that attains conceptual homology with a given criterion, ordinarily ‘the intention of the author at the moment of inscription’) begins in the…

When I read papers or give presentations about hermeneutics, people always ask me, ‘If you’re right and there is no intrinsic “meaning” in texts about which to be right or wrong, are all interpretations equal? Aren’t some interpretations just plain wrong? I mean, you talk about The da Vinci Code all the time as an…

One of the conventional slogans that partially-informed readers parrot about postmodern thought and post-structuralism holds that it means ‘anything goes’, that it erases the distinction between right and wrong. But as a matter of demonstrable fact, specifically modern hermeneutics hasn’t advanced ‘correctness’ or general consensus on matters of interpretation over the past 250 years or…

I’ve written before about my restlessness about naming my project. In that post, I describe my eventual contentment with the designation ‘differential hermeneutics’; it’s fair, it does the trick, and people already associate it with me. At one point I considered including in the monograph version an entire chapter of possible titles, with the explanation…

In Rowan Williams’s The Edge of Words, he cites George Steiner to the effect that modern accounts of truth provide little insight into falsity (p 45). I’m open guard when I see scholars expressing themselves about language and truth and falsity for a variety of reasons (very greatly as I respect Williams, and much as…

I was thinking this morning about the phenomenon of people pushing back on ideas — not strictly ‘postmodern’ ideas, but ideas that have become generally accepted in the aftermath of the strong pressure postmodern thought exerted over several decades. (That last clause made me feel rather old.) Think of the idea that ‘objectivity’ isn’t a…

In the past few weeks, I’ve sent away three four pieces for consideration/publication. At such a pace, I’m sure that not every paragraph is well-formed; that’s the price for getting work off my desk in a summer overshadowed by the clouds from the deaths of Margaret’s dad and my mother. If something is accepted, I…

Since everyone knows that ‘postmodernism’ means ‘anything goes, nothing is true, everything is permitted’, the latest outbreak of unmitigated flagrant prevarication from the new inhabitant of the White House has engendered an unseasonable tsunami of the threadbare ‘see what happens when postmodernists blah blah blah’ fustian and twaddle. I thought — having lived through it…

I had a small breakthrough in my thinking about my hermeneutical project yesterday morning before church, perhaps the most frustrating time for such an insight, since I absolutely had to be present at the beginning of the Blessings of Palms before the procession and Palm Sunday liturgy. I managed to scribble down what I think…