The hermeneutic claim of universality revisited

Author(s)

Rafael Barros de Oliveira

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2019-12-02

Examining board members

Ricardo Ribeiro Terra; Nathalie de Almeida Bressiani; Fernando Costa Mattos; Luiz Sergio Repa

• Advisor: Ricardo Ribeiro Terra

Abstract

There is a silent consensus around the overcoming of a hermeneutic philosophy with a claim to universaliy. The arguments built here turns itself to reexamine this consensus. Picking up from the postulation of a universal hermeneutics in Hans-Georg Gadamer, grounded upon an ontological conception of language and the finitude of human existence, three critical interactions with Gadamerian hermeneutics during the e1960s and 1970s are revisited: those with Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and Paul Ricoeur. Habermas turned himself against the sedimentation of traditional domination structures implicit in Gadamer\'s conception of language, claiming for the necessity of complementing it with a deeper layer of reconstruction of the conditions of communication, whose model would come from psychoanalysis. Apel turns himself against the normative and epistemologic deficit of Gadamer\'s position, point towards a correction of the route through the invervention of a transcendentalized pragmatism. Finally, Ricoeur seeks the middle path, polarizing between amplifying traditions and the suspicion of meaning to build a kind of dialectic hermeneutics where this tension does not allow itself to be reduced to a single facet. Judging the objections from the mains point of Gadamer\'s hermeneutics - it\'s claim to universality - it is concluded that none of these critiques makes it impossible to take it up again and reelaborate it, in part because some of them have been satisfiably responded by Gadamer himself, in part because his philosophy leaves space open to the other demands to be accom-modated within it. As evidence of this latente possibility I have summoned the contemporary efforts of Christian Berner and Johann Michel, who elaborate - each in his own manner - a hermeneutic philosophy which claims to be universal and where the oppositions of all listed authors are dealt with. Finally, I summarize the fundamental features of a universal hermeneutic philosophy. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 16/25103-5 - The hermeneutic claim for universality revisited
• Grantee: Rafael Barros de Oliveira
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master