The Responsibility to Understand

What is the significance of hermeneutics at the intersections of ethics, politics and the arts and humanities?

• Discusses how hermeneutics offers ways to develop an ethics
• Makes the case for the relevance of contemporary hermeneutics for current scholarly discussions of responsibility within continental European philosophy
• Contributes a new, ethically inflected approach to current debate within post-Gadamerian hermeneutics
• Extends his analysis to the practice of living and covers animals, art, literature and translation

Few topics have received broader attention within contemporary philosophy than that of responsibility. Theodore George makes a novel case for a distinctive sense of responsibility at stake in the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation.

He argues for the significance of this hermeneutical responsibility in the context of our relations with things, animals and others, as well as political solidarity and the formation of solidarities through the arts, literature and translation.