Hermeneutics Seminar - Summer 2025
Hermeneutics Seminar - Summer 2025
August 4-8, 2025
August 4-8, 2025
The seminar will offer seminar students an opportunity to dive directly into key primary texts of 20th-century hermeneutics, focusing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. The readings will also include secondary material illuminating the primary texts.
Drawing on the classical theory of the hermeneutic circle, 20th-century hermeneutics revised Hegelian dialectic in its most idealistic version by rejecting its conception of history as progress toward a final synthesis of absolute knowledge. Hermeneutic philosophy regards history and understanding instead as a circular relationship—productive but ever imperfect. This imperfect dialectic is expressed in innumerable forms—between convention and invention, general and particular, self and other, finite and infinite, and the theme we have chosen for the seminar, distance and belonging. All readings will be connected to this theme. We will consider how the hermeneutic themes of distance and belonging may be particularly germane for situating and addressing the polarization in contemporary political and social discussion.
The online Hermeneutics Seminar is designed to offer graduate students and advanced undergraduates an introduction to hermeneutics. Students new to hermeneutics are particularly welcome, as are students with some background in the field who want to engage in reading and discussing central texts. There are separate links at the bottom right of this page for more specific program requirements and for registration and payment.
A certificate will be awarded upon successful completion of the course.
The deadline for registration is March 31, 2025.
Week of August 4-8, 2025
Five days of classes, all online and taught in English
Class sessions each run 90 minutes
Morning sessions: 9am US Eastern Daylight Time
Afternoon sessions: 1pm Eastern Daylight Time
Office hours daily: 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
Hermeneutics offers an approach to interpretation geared toward understanding, a theme that may seem ordinary and banal but is quite sophisticated and greatly in demand in a world striven by opposition and conflict. Hermeneutics has been applied in numerous fields, including not only philosophy but anthropology, education, gender studies, history, intercultural dialogue, international development, law, literature, medicine, natural science, psychology, race studies, religious studies, rhetoric, social science, social and political theory, and translation studies. The 20th century intellectual heirs of hermeneutics include Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, and these are the figures the seminar will concentrate on.
John Arthos
Michael Johnson
Gonçalo Marcelo
Fernando Nascimento
George Taylor
David Utsler
Cristina Vendra