Hermeneutics Seminar Summer 25- Instructors

August 4-8, 2024

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. 

Gonçalo Marcelo is a researcher and a member of the executive board at the Centre for Classical and Humanistic Studies at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Currently, he is also an invited lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra, and also at Católica Porto Business School. His Ph.D. is in Moral and Political Philosophy from the New University of Lisbon. He has been a visiting researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, at the Fonds Ricoeur in Paris, and at Columbia University in the US. Recently, he was the co-organizer of the 2024 international conference on “Hermeneutic Rationality and the Future of the Humanities.” He previously organized the international conference “Reading Ricoeur Once Again: Hermeneutics and Practical Philosophy” held in Lisbon in 2010. His main research areas are in the fields of Social and Political Philosophy, Ethics, Hermeneutics, and Critical Theory. He has written extensively on Ricoeur and on critical theorist Axel Honneth. Representative recent writing includes: "Tasks for a Critical Theory of Democracy in Europe," Azimuth 16 (2020): 171-187; "Towards a Critical Hermeneutics of Populism," Critical Hermeneutics 3 (2019): 59-84; "Critique des idéologies, critique des utopies," Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 9, no. 1 (2018): 28-41; and "Ricoeur and Patocka on the Idea of Europe and its Crisis," Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy 9, no. 2 (2017): 509-535.

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 recently published 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.

Maria Cristina Clorinda Vendra is assistant professor at the University Jan-Evangelista-Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem (Czech Republic). She previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Prague. She is currently involved as a member of the research project, “The Face of Nature in Contemporary French Phenomenology: Challenges of New Metaethics and Ecology,” funded by the Czech Science Foundation. She has published articles and book chapters on Ricoeur’s thought and has participated in numerous international conferences and workshops in Europe, the United States, and Canada. She is presently serving as European Director for the Society for Ricœur Studies. Her scholarly interests include ecophenomenology, environmental hermeneutics, ecological ethics, and social philosophy.