Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus on hermeneutics, Truth and Method.
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. As necessary, hermeneutics may include the art of understanding and communication.
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
Reading Capital is a 1965 book about the philosopher Karl Marx's Das Kapital by the philosophers Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière, the sociologist Roger Establet, and the critic Pierre Macherey. The book was first published in France by François Maspero. An abridged English translation was published in 1970, and an unabridged translation in 2015. The book was influential among intellectuals.
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science.
Reception theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes each particular reader's reception or interpretation in making meaning from a literary text. Reception theory is generally referred to as audience reception in the analysis of communications models. In literary studies, reception theory originated from the work of Hans-Robert Jauss in the late 1960s, and the most influential work was produced during the 1970s and early 1980s in Germany and the US, with some notable work done in other Western European countries. A form of reception theory has also been applied to the study of historiography.
The historical-grammatical method is a modern Christian hermeneutical method that strives to discover the biblical authors' original intended meaning in the text. According to the historical-grammatical method, if based on an analysis of the grammatical style of a passage, it appears that the author intended to convey an account of events that actually happened, then the text should be taken as representing history; passages should only be interpreted symbolically, poetically, or allegorically if to the best of our understanding, that is what the writer intended to convey to the original audience. It is the primary method of interpretation for many conservative Protestant exegetes who reject the historical-critical method to various degrees, in contrast to the overwhelming reliance on historical-critical interpretation in biblical studies at the academic level.
Source criticism is the process of evaluating an information source, i.e.: a document, a person, a speech, a fingerprint, a photo, an observation, or anything used in order to obtain knowledge. In relation to a given purpose, a given information source may be more or less valid, reliable or relevant. Broadly, "source criticism" is the interdisciplinary study of how information sources are evaluated for given tasks.
Rhetoric of science is a body of scholarly literature exploring the notion that the practice of science is a rhetorical activity. It emerged after a number of similarly oriented topics of research and discussion during the late 20th century, including the sociology of scientific knowledge, history of science, and philosophy of science, but it is practiced most typically by rhetoricians in academic departments of English, speech, and communication.
Warren Montag is a professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is known primarily for his work on twentieth-century French theory, especially Althusser and his circle, as well as his studies of the philosophers Spinoza, Locke, and Hobbes.
The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. The circle is a metaphor for the procedure of transforming one's understanding of the part and the whole through iterative recontextualization.
Truth and Method is a 1960 book by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, in which the author deploys the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics" as it is worked out in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927). The book is considered Gadamer's major work.
How to Read Donald Duck is a 1971 book-length essay by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart that critiques Disney comics from a Marxist point of view as capitalist propaganda for American corporate and cultural imperialism. It was first published in Chile in 1971, became a bestseller throughout Latin America and is still considered a seminal work in cultural studies. It was reissued in August 2018 to a general audience in the United States, with a new introduction by Dorfman, by OR Books.
Common sense is "knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument". As such, it is often considered to represent the basic level of sound practical judgement or knowledge of basic facts that any adult human being ought to possess. It is "common" in the sense of being shared by nearly all people. The everyday understanding of common sense is ultimately derived from historical philosophical discussions. Relevant terms from other languages used in such discussions include Latin sensus communis, Ancient Greek κοινὴ αἴσθησις, and French bon sens. However, these are not straightforward translations in all contexts, and in English different shades of meaning have developed. In philosophical and scientific contexts, since the Age of Enlightenment the term "common sense" has been used for rhetorical effect both approvingly and disapprovingly. On the one hand it has been a standard for good taste, good sense, and source of scientific and logical axioms. On the other hand it has been equated to conventional wisdom, vulgar prejudice, and superstition.
The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a break in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.
Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University and a visiting professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of what Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
The hermeneutics of suspicion is a style of literary interpretation in which texts are read with skepticism in order to expose their purported repressed or hidden meanings.
In literary criticism and cultural studies, postcritique is the attempt to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Such methods have been characterized as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" by Paul Ricœur and as a "paranoid" or suspicious style of reading by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Proponents of postcritique argue that the interpretive practices associated with these ways of reading are now unlikely to yield useful or even interesting results. As Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker put it in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, "the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident." A postcritical reading of a literary text might instead emphasize emotion or affect, or describe various other phenomenological or aesthetic dimensions of the reader's experience. At other times, it might focus on issues of reception, explore philosophical insights gleaned via the process of reading, pose formalist questions of the text, or seek to resolve a "sense of confusion."
