This book presents contemporary analyses of interpretation by some of the most prominent figures in contemporary philosophy and literary criticism. These essays question and transform traditional statements on the aims, methods, and techniques of interpretation. The essays demonstrate how contemporary discussions of interpretation are necessarily sent back to the hermeneutic tradition. Emphasizing the importance of Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on the contemporary debates concerning current interpretive practices, this volume traces the differences in interpretive perspectives generated in the writings of Michel Foucault, Eric Blondel, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Manfred Frank, Werner Hamacher, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The essays by Foucault, Blondel, Frank, Hamacher, and Nancy appear here for the first time in English.

"In a South African context ... condemning apartheid is not enough. To make a non-racial, democratic, inclusive society viable and enduring, much more is required ? of which creative and imaginative theological thinking is not the least. Fundamental theological values and their implications for all the facets of society must be thought through ? not as an academic exercise, but as a grass-roots undertaking ? and the greatest challenge is to act in terms of this new understanding of society." - Bernard Lategan, Some implications of the family concept in New Testament texts

Leading contemporary philosopher Johann Michel offers an innovative reflection on the human being. The book presents an interdisciplinary study that engages philosophy, sociology and anthropology, offering a systematic analysis of the phenomenon of interpretation.

This book explores the rapidly growing interdisciplinary area of hermeneutics and its significance for biblical studies, combining wide, fundamental, rigorous, and creative theoretical concerns with practical questions about how we read biblical texts.

Here are the major statements of the leading figures in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and French hermeneutic traditions--the major statements on the aims, methods, and techniques of interpretation. Some of these appear here for the first time in English. This book establishes the context for contemporary analyses of interpretation. Part I traces the evolution of hermeneutics from Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher through Wilhelm Dilthey to Martin Heidegger's placing of hermeneutics at the center of the ontological analysis of human being. Part II follows the development of the Heideggerian tradition in the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer's "philosophical hermeneutics" is then located at the center of several important exchanges with more traditional, objective hermeneutical methodologists like Emilio Betti, ideology-critics like Jürgen Habermas, and linguistic-phenomenological thinkers like Paul Ricoeur.

The apparently simple notion that it is contextualization and invocation of context that give form to our interpretations raises important questions about context definition. Moreover, different disciplines involved in the elucidation and interpretation of meanings construe context indifferent ways. How do these ways differ? And what analytical strategies are adopted in order to suggest that the relevant context is "self-evident"? The notion of context has received less attention than is due such a central, key concept in social anthropology, as well as in other related disciplines. This collection of contributions from a group of leading social anthropologists and anthropological linguists addresses the question of how the idea of context is constructed, invoked, and deployed in the interpretations put forward by social anthropologists. The ethnographic focus embraces peoples from regions such as Bali, Europe, Malawi, and Zaire. Primarily theoretical in its aims, the work also draws on expertise from anthropological linguistics and philosophy in order to set the issue as much in a comparative disciplinary perspective as in a comparative cross-cultural one.

Engage the delightful and inspiring, sometimes rough and rocky road to inclusive and transformative Bible reading This book offers the results of research within a new area of discipline—empirical hermeneutics in intercultural perspective. The book includes interpretations from the homeless in Amsterdam, to Indonesia, from African Xhosa readers to Norway, to Madagascar, American youths, Germany, Czech Republic, Colombia, and Haitian refugees in the Dominican Republic. Features: Interpretations from ordinary readers in more than twenty-five countries Background introduction with history of the text Discussion of intertextual connections with Greco-Roman authors