书名: The Riddle of the Sphinx: Interpreting the Human World
作者: H. P. Rickman (Author)
出版社: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (May 2004)
语言: English
ISBN-10: 083863995X
ISBN-13: 978-0838639955
Book Description
This book, a collection of essays, addresses the question "How can we achieve a better, i.e., more soundly based and systematically unified understanding of the human world?" Human problems abound in our world: there is crime, mental illness, industrial conflict, and violent suspicion between nations, races, creeds, and cultures. While improved theories cannot solve all our problems, increased insight might help. The disciplines supposed to aid us such as psychology or sociology disappoint our hopes. There is conflict not only between them but among them and there is lack of clarity about concepts and methods. Until recently salvation was sought by clinging closely to the immensely successful methods of the physical sciences but there is increasing recognition in the human sciences that observation, which provides evidence of the physical sciences, needs to be supplemented by understanding, because human beings talk, and communications are an indispensable source of knowledge. The critical question addressed in this book then is: once we are forced to abandon the rigor of disciplines such as physics how can the human disciplines be systematic and develop clear criteria for the adequacy of conclusions?
The first part deals broadly with philosophic and methodological issues, examines the Anglo-Saxon approach to the social sciences, and makes some points about the philosophy of history. It also provides a presuppositional framework for the interpretive approach to the second part, whose main focus is on hermeneutics. This is the art of interpretation dating back to ancienct Greece and has since the nineteenth century been proposed as a model for rigorous interpretive approach to the human world. Understanding a personality or a social arrangement is less like drawing conclusions from a laboratory experiment and more like interpreting a legal rule or religious text where getting it right still matters. Such a skill is important not only in the social sciences but in everyday life where ambiguous reading of contracts, speeches, etc., is familiar.
The essays included cover the nature and epistemological status of hermeneutics. There is an essay on Vico, who anticipated crucial themes of Dilthey, who pioneered the use of hermeneutics and on whom Rickman has written extensively. After exploring its relation to rhetoric and literary appreciation, the affinities and differences between science and hermeneutics are discussed. The final essay critically examines deconstruction as an extreme and ill-judged development of hermeneutics.
About the Author
H.P. Rickman was born in Prague in 1918 and emigrated to England in 1938. He earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of London and his D.Phil. degree at Oxford University. After three-and-a-half years of wartime service, Rickman became a lecturer in philosophy, first at Hull University and then at the City University, London, where he took early retirement in 1982 and now holds the rank of visiting professor. From the age of six, Rickman was devoted to poetry and fiction. At the age of sixteen, he became dedicated to the field of philosophy. His research specialized on the philosophy of human studies (with particular reference to W. Dilthey), but also concentrated on aesthetics and literary subjects. He has published fifteen books, including two thrillers, many contributions to encyclopedias, and more than seventy articles, mostly in learned journals.
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作者: H. P. Rickman (Author)
出版社: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (May 2004)
语言: English
ISBN-10: 083863995X
ISBN-13: 978-0838639955
Book Description
This book, a collection of essays, addresses the question "How can we achieve a better, i.e., more soundly based and systematically unified understanding of the human world?" Human problems abound in our world: there is crime, mental illness, industrial conflict, and violent suspicion between nations, races, creeds, and cultures. While improved theories cannot solve all our problems, increased insight might help. The disciplines supposed to aid us such as psychology or sociology disappoint our hopes. There is conflict not only between them but among them and there is lack of clarity about concepts and methods. Until recently salvation was sought by clinging closely to the immensely successful methods of the physical sciences but there is increasing recognition in the human sciences that observation, which provides evidence of the physical sciences, needs to be supplemented by understanding, because human beings talk, and communications are an indispensable source of knowledge. The critical question addressed in this book then is: once we are forced to abandon the rigor of disciplines such as physics how can the human disciplines be systematic and develop clear criteria for the adequacy of conclusions?
The first part deals broadly with philosophic and methodological issues, examines the Anglo-Saxon approach to the social sciences, and makes some points about the philosophy of history. It also provides a presuppositional framework for the interpretive approach to the second part, whose main focus is on hermeneutics. This is the art of interpretation dating back to ancienct Greece and has since the nineteenth century been proposed as a model for rigorous interpretive approach to the human world. Understanding a personality or a social arrangement is less like drawing conclusions from a laboratory experiment and more like interpreting a legal rule or religious text where getting it right still matters. Such a skill is important not only in the social sciences but in everyday life where ambiguous reading of contracts, speeches, etc., is familiar.
The essays included cover the nature and epistemological status of hermeneutics. There is an essay on Vico, who anticipated crucial themes of Dilthey, who pioneered the use of hermeneutics and on whom Rickman has written extensively. After exploring its relation to rhetoric and literary appreciation, the affinities and differences between science and hermeneutics are discussed. The final essay critically examines deconstruction as an extreme and ill-judged development of hermeneutics.
About the Author
H.P. Rickman was born in Prague in 1918 and emigrated to England in 1938. He earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of London and his D.Phil. degree at Oxford University. After three-and-a-half years of wartime service, Rickman became a lecturer in philosophy, first at Hull University and then at the City University, London, where he took early retirement in 1982 and now holds the rank of visiting professor. From the age of six, Rickman was devoted to poetry and fiction. At the age of sixteen, he became dedicated to the field of philosophy. His research specialized on the philosophy of human studies (with particular reference to W. Dilthey), but also concentrated on aesthetics and literary subjects. He has published fifteen books, including two thrillers, many contributions to encyclopedias, and more than seventy articles, mostly in learned journals.
[thread=9377]论坛相关讨论主题[/thread]
