Critical Hermeneutics. Biannual International Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1, n. 1, December 2017, Part I (On Understanding and Interpretation: The Issues and Perspectives of Contemporary Hermeneutics)

Papers from the following authors are included in this issue: Silvana Borutti, Vereno Brugiatelli, Vinicio Busacchi, Marco Casucci, Beatriz Contreras Tasso, Pier Luigi Lecis, Giuseppe Martini, Gaspare Mura and Luís António Umbelino. In her epistemological paper, ‘An Epistemological Look at Comparison’, Borutti develops an analysis around a specific type of comparison, which is differential and contrastive. Wittgenstein’s approach, that comparing is not simply seeing but rather ‘seeing as’, constitutes the main reference here. Starting from this point, a problematisation is articulated that on the one hand focuses a somehow formalising criteriology of comparison and on the other hand parallels Peirce’s approach on hypothetical and indirect inference. Brugiatelli’s paper, ‘Ontological or Nominal Hermeneutics? The Problem of the Relationship between Hermeneutics and Being in Gadamer, Rorty, Vattimo and Ricoeur’, proposes an interesting parallel among some key figures in contemporary philosophical hermeneutics about the ontological-anthropological relationship between language and Being. To this, Brugiatelli connects an itinerary internal to Ricoeur’s hermeneutical thought, oriented to determine both its specific ontological basis and its particular explanation concerning language possibility to express the extralinguistic. In ‘Hermeneutics Reloaded: From Science/Philosophy Dichotomy to Critical Hermeneutics’, Busacchi proposes a general reconsideration of the nature and function(s) of today and tomorrow philosophical hermeneutics, both under a technical-procedural and speculative plane, and introduces a specific idea of ‘critical hermeneutics’. In ‘Between Explanation and Understanding: On Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the Parallel Discourse’, Casucci thematises the classical, methodological and epistemological problems implicated in correlating explicative and comprehensive procedures. He realises it, trying to redefine Ricoeur’s dialectical-discoursive perspective in terms of ‘parallel discourse’, as formulated from Furia Valori around Heidegger and Gadamer. In Contreras Tasso’s paper, ‘Original Affirmation, Self-Appropriation and Attestation: Three Main Concepts for a Hermeneutics of Reception in Paul Ricoeur’ with a notable phenomenological sensitivity she explores the connection of Ricoeur’s philosophy of the capable human being with three key-terms of reflective thought (that are disposed between the anthropological and ontological dimensions): original affirmation, appropriation and attestation. Lecis and Busacchi, in their theoretical approach text, ‘Imagination controlled: Representation and Factuality in Historical Knowledge’, thematise the question of the relationship between imagination and representation in historical knowledge. A perspective emerges that underlines the irreducible connection of hermeneutical and non-hermeneutical contents in historical and historiographical research, particularly by putting ‘under tension’ the theme of reality of the past with the functioning of memory and the question of the rigour of the procedure of knowing with the subjective dimension of testimony. Martini’s contribution, ‘Hermeneutical Perspective in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis: An Overall View and Its Development Lines’, is a work of psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory of a philosophical-hermeneutic nature focused on the relation between the representational and the unrepresentational. Martini’s assumption is that ‘as psychiatry and psychoanalysis tend to reduce psychic suffering, they always relate to understanding and the search of meaning’. Mura proposes with acuteness and erudition, in his article ‘Hermeneutics in Late Antiquity: Theological Perspectives’, a general historical-speculative reconsideration of the relationship between theological reflection and philosophical hermeneutics. Beginning from Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur’s suggestions referring to the narrow connection of hermeneutics and theology, Mura examines some boundary-themes, as the pre-understanding, the relationship between revelation and interpretation, etc. Finally, Umbelino, in ‘On Paul Ricoeur’s Unwritten Project of an Ontology of Place’, develops an interesting proposal of a Ricoeurian ‘ontology of place’ considered in the same sense and value of Ricoeur’s ontology of historicity defined in Memory, History, Forgetting (2000).