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Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer
424 pages | 6 x 9 | 2002
ISBN 978-0-271-02243-7 | cloth: $106.00 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-02244-4 | paper: $39.00 sh
Images of and references to women are so rare in the vast corpus of his published work that there seems to be no "woman question" for Hans-Georg Gadamer. Yet the authors of the fifteen essays included in this volume show that it is possible to read past Gadamer's silences about women and other Others to find rich resources for feminist theory and practice in his views of science, language, history, knowledge, medicine, and literature.
While the essayists find much of value in Gadamer's work, he emerges from their discussion as a controversial figure. Some contributors see him as promoting genuine respect for and engagement with Otherness: others claim that in a Gadamerian conversation the Other has no voice. For some, Gadamer's immersion in tradition is an impediment to feminist inquiry; for others, cognizant of the need to understand tradition well in order to contest its intransigence or benefit from its insights, his way of engaging tradition is especially productive. Some contributors take issue with the separation he maintains between philosophy and politics; others find problems in his relative silence on matters of embodiment; still others maintain that a "fusion of horizons" amounts to a colonizing of difference. But a common aim of each of these controversies is to discern what feminists can learn from Gadamer as well as what limitations feminist reinterpretations of his work must inevitably encounter.
Contributors are Linda Martín Alcoff, William Cowling, Gemma Corradi Fiumara, Marie Fleming, Silja Freudenberger, Susan Hekman, Susan-Judith Hoffmann, Grace M. Jantzen, Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, Laura Kaplan, Robin Pappas, Robin May Schott, Meili Steele, Veronica Vasterling, Georgia Warnke, and Kathleen Roberts Wright.
Lorraine Code is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Graduate Programs in Social and Political Thought, and Women's Studies, at York University in Toronto. Her other books include Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories (editor, 2000), Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on (Gendered) Locations (1995), What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (1991), and Epistemic Responsibility (1987).
Contents
Preface
Nancy Tuana
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Feminists Do Not Read Gadamer
Lorraine Code
Part I: Hermeneutic Projects, Feminist Interventions
Engendering Gadamerian Conversations
1. (En)gendering Dialogue Between Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Feminist Thought
Kathleen Roberts Wright
2. Hermeneutics and Constructed Identities
Georgia Warnke
3. Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics and Feminist Projects
Susan-Judith Hoffmann
4. Gadamer’s Conversation: Does the Other Have A Say?
Marie Fleming
5. The Development of Hermeneutic Prospects
Gemma Corradi Fiumara
6. Postmodern Hermeneutics? Toward a Critical Hermeneutics
Veronica Vasterling
7. The Ontology of Change: Gadamer and Feminism
Susan Hekman
8. Toward a Critical Hermeneutics
Robin Pappas and William Cowling
Part II: Feminist Issues: Enlisting Gadamerian Resources
9. Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology
Linda Martín Alcoff
10. The Hermeneutic Conversation as Epistemological Model
Silja Freudenberger
11. The Horizon of Natality: Gadamer, Heidegger, and the Limits of Existence
Grace M. Jantzen
12. Questioning Authority
Patricia Altenbernd Johnson
13. Gender, Nazism, and Hermeneutics
Robin May Schott
14. Three Problematics of Linguistic Vulnerability
Meili Steele
15. Three Applications of Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Philosophy-Faith-Feminism
Laura Kaplan
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index