Chapter 4.1: The hermeneutic circle 

Great explanation, thanks. Unlike a few others here, I found it very pleasant that you took your time speaking. Made it easier to understand.

I watched the video and then I read the comments. When I watched the video again I understood it better.

Fantastic explanation and the measured, deliberate speaking gave me time to really consider each sentence. Thank you for this.

For anyone going frame by frame trying to work it out, at 9:56, the red screen reads 'media offline' in several languages.

Interpretation 0:32 Difference in Natural Science 0:50 “Humanities study products of human mind” 1:07 Questions 1:59 The Hermeneutic Circle 2:26 “Meaning is determined by the whole as a whole, not by the parts individually” 2:34 Example of Holism 3:16 Tastiness 3:56 Meaning is even more holistic than taste.

This is an absolutely EXCELLENT synopsis of a construct that is described vaguely (at best) in the literature. Thank you!

This is the best explanation of Hermeneutics on RU-vid

Thank you so much. I have litteraly been sitting for 2 hours reading thru 20 pages on this and not gotten it down, but with this video you have really helped me understand the concept.

Excellent - straightforward, unambiguous and uncomplicated.

Thank you so much for this clear explanation! Keep on doing this! More power to the team!

Thank you for making this available. It's a great intro to what can be a bit cryptic.

Brilliant!! Thank you so much for the absolutely simple and clear explanation!

Wow! Thankyou for all the thought and effort you put into this series, to make such complex concepts seem within reach. I'm sure if I try to go look up the same thing on my own, I won't be able to grasp it unless I persist and deal with the initial discomfort. But that's such a pity because just being familiar with the concept is wonderful, and broadens the mind for future connections. Thankyou for making this possible.

Nicely done! Thanks for your clarity and pace.

This helped me a lot! The pace is just perfect for me as it gives me time to really think about what is being said. Thank you!

This series is awesome! It's helped me from Argentina. Greetings!

Thank you, that was the best explanation of HC I have ever got :)

I think I get it. The purpose is to get a better understanding of what the author (artist, etc.) intended to communicate when he/she created the work that you are studying, and when we increase the context, we increase the understanding. I suppose one can never arrive at a complete understanding because we can never be the person who created it, but it is an interesting and useful concept nonetheless.

Excellent explanation. Means a lot for a beginner like me. Thank you and God bless your efforts!

Excellent lecturer/script! Easy to understand.

Do you have a book??? I will definitely add your book to my collections if you've written one. Your teachings are very clear and easy to follow. Thank you.

7:00 Shakespeare wrote a beautiful speech about honour in Henry IV part 1 spoken by the legendary Falstaff.

Marvellous clear explication.

Excellent and deals with basics

Magnificent speaker. Thank you for this lucid explanation.

very clear explanations

Thanks for your succinct elucidation. There is also the problem of over interpretation, i.e.adding more context based on our own preferences or even bias, beyond what the writer originally intended. But we would never know that. What is your thought on this?

Easy explanation, thanks!

lifesaver! thank you

Great explanation without talking in circles

At some point in the past when we did not know the science of volcanic eruptions, people did see meanings in them - like God's signal maybe. Since we now know the mechanism we call it an event and feel that there is no meaning in volcanic eruptions. So, can it be that all such meanings are a signal of limited or inadequate understanding?

Helpful video! Thanks

What happens if there is no context? For example, astronomers discover a "thing" never seen or experienced before. Current understanding is absent and so is memory: No context; no circle is possible. We have to wait for a context to develop - yet there still exists a "thing" which we may name ("X") - or not. "X" is a word without context. Our hermeneutic interpretation stalls. We are caught in the same trap as Wittgenstein's language games; words (and experiences and things) exist without hermeneutic "meaning." Some things (including words) exist and refer only to their peculiar individuality - not a "community" of interpretation.

Would hermeneutic scholars then think that its only worth studying texts of death authors, since we could simply ask a living author what he or she meant by what she wrote?

A great explanation, an even greater shirt.

This is wonderful.

Great explanation, thanks!

All Ur lectures are par excellence.

Lead research strategy across different verticals for corporates and VCs (content partnerships, curated research, newsletters, social media) - Interface for sales strategy with Sales/BDR and CSM teams - Interface with product and data to enhance sector-specific insights

This helped me to write my course work more than 3 books😭 Thanks 😍❤️

Great explanation!

Excellent explanation Thanks so much

regarding "is there a perfect interpretation": theoretically if we arrive at the author's interpretation, and then we could interpret the author within a larger context and so give a larger meaning to _their_ interpretation of their own work. The *perfect* interpretation would surely have to be that which brings you back to the beginning haha

Thinking about the last thought - you could know you have nothing new to learn from going around the circle if your thoughts at the start of an iteration and at the end of an iteration are the same. Of course this is more computational / mathematical approach to the concept since people usually don't read like machines and sometimes it takes reading the same passage multiple times before we get something. Even then outside context can change the reading. So if you were like a physicist or working with fuzzy logic, you'd probably conclude that you are done reading something when the change inbetween iterations is small enough that it's not worth doing another iteration.

Great video. Thanks.

I think flavour is a more accurate word than taste... Taste typically refers to sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy, whereas flavour is the multitude of different smells

An apple falling from a tree means that life is ending, the apple will eventually rot and die. The apple falling means that death exist

Excellent! in a circular way...

Thank you sir!!

I love Gijsbers I wish he'd make more of this; I would never have to read again

Thank you very much!

Thank you very much for ur lecture.

Couldn't the hermeneutic circle be better characterized as the "hermeneutic back-and-forth," or the the "hermeneutic spiral"?

I listened repeated . I found clarity of concepts

Great.. Thank you..

Excellent .

Great!

Thank you

I swear I saw this guy at Woodstock.

It's just fine. Not too short or too long

I find it funny that on a video about hermeneutics that many of these comments are some of the worst examples of the application of hermeneutics.

Very good, thank you

Good work.

Thank you.

excellent video

thanks mate!

If a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a noise?

Holism, Contextualism, Pragmatics, Semantic Minimalism, Meaning, Hermeneutics. Herneneutic interpretation=Recanati? as opposed to input-output semantic minimalist account?

The underlying assumption is that the original author had a clear idea about what his/her words mean. In reality most people are rather fuzzy on the meaning of a lot of the concepts that we use. Also, as soon as a bit of time has passed since the text was authored, a lot of the context is lost to the erosion of time. Things aren't written down and people forget. In short: We will never know exactly what Shakespeare mean with the word honor, and it is not only for the reasons stated in the video. In fact the man himself may only have had an approximate, fuzzy definition of the word in his head when he wrote it.

Thank you :)

relly good work

Thank you so much!!!!!!! ^_^

Particularly challenging where people write ambiguously.

9:56

Life saver

Around 10:00 there's a slight Adobe Premier gap :D

Humanities study products of the human mind, which, unlike natural occurrence (hurricane forming, volcano erupting, lightning striking), do have meanings that move the humanities to work; the meaning of the whole is not simply the sum of its parts; words as having no determinate meaning apart from their context, like the word 'can'; the meaning of the word is not simply the sum of its parts, i.e., its phonemes and its morphemes, but rather it has meaning both as a result of those units and as a result of its context, like how it functions in the sentence as a part of speech, a noun or auxiliary verb or an adjective, for example; sentences only have a determinate and specific meaning in a larger context; the context that determines something meaning is unlimited, which means; we may never know for sure that we have gotten to the right interpretation of what the author originally meant; we can go ever round the hermeneutic circle My notes :D

The hermeneutic circle? Would a hermeneutic polygon be more accurate?

this guy is a goat

Holism: Emergence, but with meaning

Where is this University? I am learning a lot from your videos.

How do you know if something is truly natural? The Japanese Earthquake - suppose it was "created" by the United States ... it would then "mean" something. How do you know that it means something?

Isn't it wrong to declare that natural events don't mean anything? For example, the fall of an apple in a society that rejects gravity could very well mean to revolt against the status quo. I argue that all things have meaning because meaning itself is constructed by people and societies.

nice

omg Manny from Black Books has swallowed small wise book.

I just came back after reading the original text by Rorty and now watching this video makes it more clear.

clicked for the shirt, stayed for the data 😁🤓

😂😂😂😂😂 that shirt tho !!!!

At 5:25ish. How does he come to the conclusion that "can" means "a promise to" in the email example; and a "boast" in the running example? Explicitly "can" means capable of. The person in the email example is 1. Explicitly stating that she is capable of sending the email ; and perhaps implying that she will. However, in our modern day environment there is no seasoned supervisor that wouldn't follow up in the "I can" response with "please send it today by xxx time" In the same vein, a runner who explicitly states, "I can" run it is not boasting but speaking truth--that he is capable of running it within that specified time. To speak truth is not boasting. If it turns out that he is not capable by means of evidence then he was not speaking truth in the first place. Just my initial thoughts...

Imagine all the people...

Subliminal message at 9:55.

9:56 what is this?! A Hideo Kojima Lecture!?

Du bist cool.

9:55 has missing content

Fucking live saver, need to hand in my thesis 23:00... but the methodologie was a cluster fuck XD

Interesting shirt

Damn intellectuals

im here from mario 64 iceberg

Interesting interpretation and understanding of hermeneutics! If you're interested in hermeneutics, political theory, philosophy, art and film theory check Amor Mundi out! Here is a link to a work on forming a political hermeneutics: ​@t thanks!