Hypoiconicity as intentionality

The paper analyses Peirce’s hypoiconicity through the lens of Husserlian intentionality. Peirce’s triple structure of hypoiconicity as resemblance relation, diagrammatical reasoning and metaphoric displacement is shown to require intentional acts in its production and interpretation. Regarding hypoiconicity as a semiotic schematization of Vorstellung, the paper places it in the context of Husserl’s conception of intentionality in which iconicity appears as a stepping-stone towards the skeletonization of resemblance in diagrammatical abstraction and as schematic displacement in metaphor. As such, hypoiconic intentionality is argued to play a role also in Peirce’s community conception of language. The paper’s core claim is that intentionality provides an avenue for revealing hypoiconicity as a major, critical concept of semiotics, functioning as paradigm case for investigating the convergence of semiotics and phenomenology

Schleiermacher’s Universal Hermeneutics and the Problematics of Rule-Following

This paper investigates how Schleiermacher’s universal hermeneutics can be considered as a better alternative to both, German rationalist aesthetics as pioneered by Christian Wolff, and Kant’s transcendental idealism, to the extent of overcoming the problematics of rule-following. A general account of the necessity of a universal hermeneutics and its meaning from historical practices of exegeses is given. This is then followed by the account of rule-following in the tradition of both German rationalist aesthetics and Kant’s transcendental idealism with latter as expounded in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The investigation is comparative and descriptive. The purpose of this study is to discuss the hermeneutic possibilities in research methodologies for human sciences

Encountering Finitude: On the Hermeneutic Radicalization of Experience

The chapter approaches the hermeneutic concept of experience introduced by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) from the perspective of the conceptual history of experience in the Western philosophical tradition. Through an overview of the concept and the epistemological function of experience (empeiria, experientia, Erfahrung) in Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Hegel, it is shown that the tradition has considered experience first and foremost in methodological terms, that is, as a pathway towards a form of scientific knowledge that is itself increasingly immune to experience. Science strives “beyond” experience because of the limitations inherent in the fundamentally contingent, singular, and negative character of experience: experience comes to us through unpredictable chance encounters and in singular situations and negates, tests, or “imperils” previous knowledge, thereby transforming it. By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics rethinks experience precisely in terms of these limitations. In the hermeneutic approach articulated by Gadamer and Claude Romano, experience is an encounter with the irreducible finitude and historical situatedness of one’s understanding and conceptual framework, an encounter with an otherness that puts our preunderstanding to test and requires us to revise it. Hermeneutic experience is thus a singular event that irreparably transforms us

Research Anticipation: the Methodological Choice

The establishment of a research strategy doesn’t necessarily suppose a specific standardization. Nothing seems to impose to the researcher a projected structure as a basis for his future approach. Our article attempts to identify a few methodological landmarks for a research strategy so that the researcher’s approach would have bigger chances to be a coherent one and thus bring results in a shorter period of time and with fewer resources. Furthermore, a research that brings certain results will have bigger chances to be recognized and validated if specialists can also find the necessary arguments for a correct methodological approach. The suggested methodological issues of a research strategy follow a logical succession, developed from the identification of the research problem (ontological option) to the validation of the research results. The choice and the construction of the actual strategy remain an object of the correct positioning of the researcher as far as the accomplishment of his approach is concerned. Our material is just a general schema of the research strategy, not a detailed presentation of every research phase – these details will be part of several other articles.researcher; research strategy; methodological landmarks; research methodology.

The Religious A Priori in Otto and its Kantian Origins

This paper provides an analysis of Rudolph Otto's understanding of the structures of human consciousness making possible the appropriation of revelation. Already in his dissertation on Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, Otto was preoccupied with how the " outer " of revelation could be united to these inner structures. Later, in his groundbreaking Idea of the Holy, Otto would explore the category of the numinous, an element of religious experience tied to the irrational element of the holy. This paper first provides a brief account of Otto's account of the holy, especially its numinous, irrational elements. Second, the paper analyzes Otto's understanding of the structures of consciousness grounding the experience of the numinous and allowing the irrational element to be " schematized " by the rational element. Otto's exposition of these structures is heavily influenced by his reception of Kant's analysis of the two stems of human cognition, namely understanding and sensibility, and their possible relation to a common root, which Otto identified with what the mystics called the ground of the soul. Yet it is in Otto's reception of Kant's Critique of Judgment that all of these ideas find their completion, and it is here where we must look to understand the relation between the religious a priori and Otto's category of the numinous. Kant's aesthetic idea is a singular representation given in intuition; it is infinitely saturated and as such intimates the ideas of God, the soul, and the world as a whole. I show how Otto appropriates Kant's aesthetic idea and its relation to ideas of reason in order to make sense of how an empirically given revelation, for instance, an experience of the numinous, can connect with the inner structures of consciousness and thereby have the singular import that it does

Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: III. Martin Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Numinous/Being Experience and the “Other Beginning” of a Futural Planetary Spirituality

The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this third in a series of papers on a group of independent figures— also including Jung, Reich, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who beginning in the crisis years of the 1930s envisioned versions of a futural “New Age” spirituality to address a globalizing materialism and its disenchantments—and so also creating a context for much of contemporary transpersonal and consciousness studies. A preliminary consideration of Heidegger in the contexts of transpersonal psychology, religious studies, the macro-histories of Toynbee and Sorokin, James on “pure experience,” and spirituality as intelligence must also lead to some reckoning with Heidegger’s disastrous initial involvement with National Socialism. Considered here in terms of a spiritual metapathology of narcissistic inflation/grandiosity, it was his way past this episode that led from the mid 1930s on into his radical critique of a globalizing technology of universal commodification and to an answering futural potential for a spiritual “Other Beginning” and “last god”—re-sacralizing humanity for the “guardianship” and “sheltering” of planet and life