Παρουσίαση/Προβολή

(PHS259) -  Χρυσόστομος Μαντζαβίνος

Περιγραφή Μαθήματος

According to a common view human actions are meaningful and texts and other by-products of human action constitute meaningful material. Text interpretation is a problem that lay-people and scientists alike are called to deal with in their everyday practices and the fundamental issue is both to accurately describe these activities and to normatively appraise them. In the last decades, one major line of thought which I want to label «postmodernist» has dominated the discussion, according to which text interpretation is not a problem that can be treated scientifically, i.e. using any of the standards employed in the natural sciences. Philosophical hermeneutics in the tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer and deconstructionism in the tradition of Derrida have challenged the possibility of achieving any kind of hermeneutic objectivity, of distinguishing between correct and incorrect interpretations and of appealing to any kind of evidential support of different interpretative hypotheses.

 

Analytical philosophy of science has – with very few exceptions – systematically avoided the treatment of the concrete problems that emerge when dealing with meaningful material, so that literally no attention is paid to a great range of disciplines that deal with text interpretation. All those disciplines, summarized under the collective term “Humanities,” are practically excluded from the endeavours of philosophers of science, largely because there is a hesitance to reconstruct and normatively appraise their activities employing the standard tools of the analytic philosophy of science, most importantly the analysis of the relationship between theory and evidence.

 

Rather than providing a criticism of the great array of «postmodernist» approaches, the aim of this seminar is positive: it attempts to show that the problem of text interpretation can be dealt with in a way that respects the standards prevailing in the general philosophy of science.

Ημερομηνία δημιουργίας

Τετάρτη 14 Οκτωβρίου 2015