Hermeneutics Seminar II - Instructors

Bimonthly September – May 2024-25

John Arthos is a professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English, and the director of the General Education Public Speaking Program at Indiana University. He studies the theoretical, cultural, historical, and pedagogical intersection of rhetoric and hermeneutics from antiquity to today. He has published four monographs (Hermeneutics After Ricoeur, Gadamer’s Poetics, Speaking Hermeneutically: Understanding in the Conduct of a Life, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics) and over fifty articles that approach hermeneutics from a rhetorical perspective. 

Anna Borisenkova holds a Ph.D in sociology from HSE University in Moscow and a MA from the University of Manchester in the UK. She was a senior research associate at HSE University and a postdoctoral researcher at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research focused on the methodology of social science as interpreted by Paul Ricœur and on narrative analysis. Anna moved to Canada in 2014. She taught sociological theory and research methods at the Universities of Toronto, Winnipeg, Guelph, Toronto Metropolitan University, and Université de Saint-Boniface. Currently Anna works for the government of Ontario. She has provided research expertise for Ontario ministries, focusing on evaluation and performance measurement of policies and programs. In addition to research specialties in social methodology and hermeneutics, Anna has interests in sociology of knowledge and urban studies.

Michael Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Religion Department at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, where he teaches courses in religion, theology, religious ethics, environmental and business ethics. His research focuses on philosophical hermeneutics and ethics in the thought of Paul Ricoeur in relation to historical and contemporary theological ethics and French reflexive philosophy. He has published several articles on Ricoeur, including "The Paradox of Attention: The Action of the Self Upon Itself," in A Companion to Freedom and Nature, edited by Scott Davidson (Lexington Press, 2018).

Fernando Nascimento is an Assistant Professor in Digital and Computational Studies at Bowdoin College in Maine, teaching courses on the philosophy of technology and hermeneutics. His research is organized in three interconnected academic axes: ethics, hermeneutics, and digital technologies. Among his writings, he is the author of A Ricoeurian Approach to Digital Technologies: Digital Poetics and Practical Wisdom (forthcoming 2024) and co-author of Meaningful Technologies: How Digital Metaphors Change the Way We Think and Live (2023).

George Taylor is an emeritus professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. He specializes in legal hermeneutics and hermeneutics more generally. He studied as a graduate student under Paul Ricoeur, and he is the co-editor of Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination and editor of his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. He is also the co-editor of Reading Ricoeur Through Law and Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics. He has written on Ricoeur extensively. 

David Utsler teaches philosophy at North Central Texas College. His work focuses on philosophical hermeneutics (especially Ricoeur and Gadamer), environmental philosophy, and critical theory. He co-edited and contributed to the first book devoted to the intersection of hermeneutics and environmental philosophy, Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics (Fordham 2014). His forthcoming monograph, Paul Ricoeur and Environmental Philosophy: An Introductory Inquiry, will be published by Lexington Books in the series, Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur. He is on the international research team for the collaborative project, Hermeneutics of Architecture: Dwelling in the Horizon of Finitude, sponsored by the International Institute for Hermeneutics, the University of Warsaw (Poland), and the University of Coimbra (Portugal). He is also the co-director for the International Association for Environmental Philosophy.