The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity : Figures and Themes / / G.B. Madison.

• Author: Madison, Gary Brent.
• Place / Publishing House: Bloomington : : Indiana University Press,, 1988.; ©1988.
• Year of Publication: 1988
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in phenomenology and existential philosophy
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (1 online resource xvi, 206 pages.)

Does the end of modernism signal the onslaught of some form of anarchistic nihilism, as some today proclaim? Or can the traditional guiding notions of philosophy—in particular, meaning, truth, and reality—be revitalized in a nonfoundational, postmetaphysical, decidedly postmodern way? The figures about whom G. B. Madison writes are active participants in this unfolding debate: Husserl, Gadamer, Hirsch, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Barthes, and Rorty. In a decidedly postmodern fashion, Madison also takes up such central themes as thenature of metaphysical thinking, metaphor, imagination, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the mind/body problem. Common to the essays presented here is a central preoccupation with the fate of philosophy and of traditional philosophical concerns in a postmodern age. Throughout, an attempt is made to bring into focus the decisive questions posed by the demise of foundationalist philosophy, of the epistemological subject and the objective world, and of the traditional, objectivistic ideas of knowledge and truth.

Table of Contents

pt. 1. Figures: A critique of Hirsch's Validity -- Method of interpretation -- Husserl's hermeneutical contribution to the explanation-understanding debate -- Merleau-Ponty and postmodernity -- Ricoeur's philosophy of metaphor -- Ricoeur and the hermeneutics of the subject -- Beyond seriousness and frivolity: a Gadamerian response to deconstruction -- pt. 2. Themes: Metaphysics as myth -- Dialogue on metaphor -- The hermeneutics of (inter)subjectivity, or: the mind-body problem deconstructed -- The philosophic centrality of the imagination: a postmodern approach.