Andrew Fuyarchuk – författare

Gadamer''s Path to Plato investigates the formative years of Hans-Georg Gadamer''s Plato studies, while studying with Martin Heidegger at Marburg University. It outlines the evolution of Heidegger''s understanding of Plato, explains why his hermeneutics and phenomenological method inspired Gadamer, and why Heidegger''s argument, that Plato was responsible for Western civilization''s forgetting the meaning of existence, provoked him. Heidegger''s provocation was crucial to the development of Gadamer''s understanding of Plato. This book thus puts forward an argument for Gadamer''s having indirectly refuted Heidegger''s Plato. This involves a dialogical relationship to the past and a re-examination of the relation of Plato to Aristotle in matters of ethics, physics, and truth. Above all, however, it is Gadamer''s concept of Platonic dialectic that refutes Heidegger. This challenge to Heidegger''s Plato was commensurate with the origination of Gadamer''s positive hermeneutical philosophy. In order to test the alleged openness of that philosophy to the other as other Gadamer''s reading of the Republic is scrutinized by using the brilliant scholarship of Stanley Rosen. An examination of their interpretations of the Republic includes an inquiry into their intellectual influences. For Gadamer these include Hegel, the Tubingen school and Jacob Klein; for Rosen, the poetic genius of Leo Strauss. Rosen''s mathematical and poetic orientation is then compared to Gadamer''s dialectical orientation to Plato. The mathematical approach dovetails with a theory of human nature and procedural rationalism in Gadamer''s hermeneutical philosophy that explains why he, in contrast to Rosen, bypasses important dimensions of the Republic such as the significance of particular characters and settings to understanding the whole. In turn, this methodological shortcoming calls into question the truth of Gadamer''s method and, with it, the foundations of a truly open and pluralist society.

The inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics refers to the meaning that exceeds anything explicitly said. This explanation has been subsumed within metaphysical and theological parameters of interpretation with little regard for the implication of Gadamer’s turn to the living language for understanding the inner word. Through examining his phenomenology of the inner word, The Inner Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics reveals its musical (rhythmic and tonal) dimensions and how they function to harmonize disparate orientations in the middle voice, above all for Gadamer, those that underlie modes of cognition in both the humanities and the sciences—a visual and auditory ethos. However, understood as constituting the music of language discernible in the middle voice, the inner word is also suppressed or forgotten by the technological extension of sight—that is, print—and thus requires a turn of the inner ear or auditory disposition. Andrew Fuyarchuk assesses theories of language in evolutionary and cognitive science in light of Gadamer’s insights into the nature of thought, and he employs them to account for a dimension of language that is inscribed in the lingual minds of our species. When recalled by the inner ear, this dimension enables us to think such opposites together as we find in the humanities and sciences together. This thinking together is expressed in a double account of an object of inquiry, such as the one Fuyarchuk puts forward about the inner word in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

Within the context of the Age of the Anthropocene, this book outlines the existential preconditions for understanding the language of nature.Andrew Fuyarchuk uses environmental hermeneutics as an example of a social conundrum, which is traced to the barriers created by Heidegger to understand animals-in-their environment. In response to these barriers, the author draws on the anthropological ontology of Li Zehou and Daoist philosophy. In contrast to the tradition of metaphysics that overshadows Heidegger, these philosophies think about humans and nature within a “one-world view” and thereby provide the conceptual resources to redefine what it means to be a human being from the domain of “being-in-nature.” This entails a transformation in the meaning of existence that the author develops in terms of three Gadamerian dispositional preconditions for a hermeneutics of nature: empathetic bodily affinity, receptivity to ambient environments, and imitation as a way of knowing.