Reviews for Understanding the arts

The average rating for Understanding the arts based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-12-14 00:00:00 Simon Brittain Not to be recommended to the casual reader. By any stretch. Specialists only. Here's a few reasons why you'll wanna pass :: You want a text address'd to you in your average everydayness sitting at the lunch counter at the local Diner. Do you know the names Schleiermacher or Dilthey? Those are the famous thinkers discussed. You believe that the Method of (emperico-naturalistico-quantito) science is the very finest and last arbiter of Truth. You don't already know what the 'hermeneutic circle' is and why it's important to get into it in the right way. You haven't read Being and Time, which is a better work anyway. You know enough to know that reading Paul Ricoeur is much more enjoyable and just as enlightening. You're not really interested in, to borrow that Ricoeur phrase, understanding Yourself as Another. And you don't want your horizon to merge with the horizon of another. You think Wirkungsgeschichtlichesbewusstsein is not a word. You know absolutely nothing about nineteenth century German Geisteswissenschaften, nor about the various projects to legitimate them in the manner Kant did for the Naturwissenschaften. You don't like to see a discussion on legal hermeneutics following a discussion of biblical hermeneutics. On equal planes. You laugh at people who say 'science' but don't have a pocket protector ; and who say 'science' but don't measure things. That is to say you think 'science' means 'measuring' and not 'knowledge.' You don't really understand understanding. But this is important, so you really should read Being and Time. No but seriously, don't go swinging casually at this thing. It's important. And it would certainly clarify a lot of misuse of swinging words like 'objective' and 'subjective', but probably if you've not already started down that road and are a very far distance down that road, you'll want to pick up something of a different size. Meanwhile, for the curious, I recommend looking into the article at the Stanford :: HERE. Not recommended. But really you should know it.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-22 00:00:00 Alex Sansone I find the idea of rating Truth and Method on a star system kind of offensive after Gadamer did so much to overturn the ontological prejudice that being is what can be quantified. Reading this book was one of the joys of my life (I finished it July 4 three years ago, happy to ignore the jingoistic explosions all around me), and I honestly didn't find it all that difficult. I wouldn't lie about that: who would deny that continental philosophy is often EXTREMELY difficult? At times in my reading life I've been bludgeoned by Husserl, Heidegger, even Merleau-Ponty, but not Gadamer. Yet he's fully the peer of these other thinkers. By the end of Truth and Method I felt illuminated, not beaten-down. In his own words: "The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from the burden of taking the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence." "Each science, as science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them." (this is contrasted with...) "In understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late if we want to know what we are supposed to believe." "Being that can be understood is language."