The Life of Understanding A Contemporary Hermeneutics [Hardcover]

In Gadamers hermeneutics, interpretation is inseparable from the broader concern of making ones way in life. In this book, James Risser builds on this insight about the juxtaposition of human living and the act of understanding by tracing hermeneutics back to the basic experience of philosophy as defined by Plato. For Risser, Plato provides resources for new directions in hermeneutics and new possibilities for the life of understanding and the understanding of life. Risser places Gadamer in dialogue with Plato, with the issue of memory as a conceptual focus. He develops themes pertaining to hermeneutics such as retrieval as a matter of convalescence, exile as a venture into the foreign, formation with respect to oneself and to life with others, the experience of language in hermeneutics, and the relationship between speaking and writing.

The brevity of the book as a whole and the shortness of each piece . . . and the fact that they are only loosely connected is one of its great strengths. . . . Each piece is a real hermeneutic treat with rich, suggestive, and non-reductive analyses that in their content and methodology resist the simple summary that is of necessity, unfortunately, called for in a review.

James Risser is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-reading Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics and editor of Heidegger Toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s. He is editor (with Walter Brogan) of American Continental Philosophy: A Reader (IUP, 2000).

[T]he overall effort of the book to offer new insights into hermeneutics based on themes borrowed from Platos work works out well: all chapters testify to a strong and sound scholarship that shows the fertility of Platos dialogues for the continuation and renewal of hermeneutics as it has been developed in the works of Gadamer and Heidegger.

More than enriching or clarifying issues in current debates, James RilC'