Experience, Interpretation and Meaning: A Dialogue between Hermeneutics and Pragmatism

This issue of EJPAP represents a new step forward in the comparison between two great philosophical traditions, Pragmatism and Hermeneutics. It recalls and mirrors the lines highlighted in the international conference held in Cagliari, Italy, in May 2019.1 On that occasion, scholars from different disciplinary fields pertaining to the two different traditions discussed the key themes of subjectivity, historicity and representation. They were understood as key thematic-problematic terms for a productive comparison between Pragmatism and Hermeneutics. The results of this dialectic, later expressed in the volume Pragmatismo ed Ermeneutica (Busacchi & Nieddu 2019), distinguished themselves for the plurality of accents, reflecting marked differences, including the specificity of the problems dealt with and within the approach used. However – both by addressing classical authors of the two traditions and by turning to authors on the margins of these traditions or to contemporary developments close to them – the various contributions seemed to turn towards a common horizon that shuns the extreme opposites of nihilistic relativism and any form of absolutism and dogmatism about reality, knowledge and what governs human action.