THE HERMENEUTIC OF SUSPICION AND RELIGION
Keywords:
Hermeneutics, Religion, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas's attack, Paul Ricoeur, SuspicionAbstract
In this paper I wish to examine a contemporary response to an important debate in the "science" of hermeneutics-- "the art of rightly understanding the speech, chiefly in written form, of another" (Schleiermacher, 1977). The 20th century has witnessed what has been termed "a profound radicalisation of the understanding of texts" inasmuch as hermeneutics--the programmatic of interpretation and all that it had hitherto supposed about the nature and relation of text and its meaning--is itself problematised. The site of the contestation has been language, understood in the broadest possible sense of the medium that functions to convey meaning, textual and otherwise.
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