Grantees for the Year 2023
Brady DeHoust (Texas A&M University, USA)
The purpose of my project is to investigate Hans-Georg Gadamer’s contribution to philosophy of religion. The question I wish to address is: can philosophical hermeneutics account for understanding and communicating genuinely transcendent phenomena? Important philosophers in contemporary phenomenology have articulated possibilities for the appearance of phenomena that transcend one’s conceptual apparatus. Though these modes of appearance account for religious experience, they challenge the conditions of communication, community, and solidarity. I aim to examine places in Gadamer’s writings in which he discusses issues of transcendence, especially those pertaining to religion, in order to explore Gadamerian resources for developing the hermeneutical dimensions of transcendent phenomena –– dimensions requisite for communal understanding. My research seeks both to complement and to challenge the insights achieved in recent phenomenology regarding the experience of transcendence, and to contribute to understanding Gadamer’s view of the relationship between language and transcendent phenomena.
Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire (University of Chicago, USA)
While scholars have for a long time argued that Gadamer was a neo-Aristotelian, the scholarship on Gadamer and Aristotle deals almost exclusively with his appropriation of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis in Truth and Method. However, Gadamer’s interpretation of Aristotle is both richer and more complex. Entitled “Ethics without Metaphysics? Gadamer’s Aristotle Between Appropriation and Critique,” my research project is the first comprehensive study of Gadamer’s work on Aristotle. Its objectives are to determine through philosophical and philological analysis how Gadamer understood Aristotelian philosophy as a whole, to understand how Gadamer’s interpretation of Aristotle influenced his development of philosophical hermeneutics, and to propose a critique of Gadamerian hermeneutics based on some problems in the interpretation of Aristotle’s work and resources in Aristotelian thought that Gadamer may have neglected.
Grantees for the Year 2022
Max Forster (Stanford University, USA) and Janice Trinh (Université de Montréal, Canada) each received a Gadamer grant in the amount of 1000 Euro. Max Forster was commended for his essay project “Hermeneutics of the Second Degree: Gadamer’s Studies of Plato and the Problem of Interpreting Interpretations”. Janice Trinh received a Gadamer grant for her proposed dissertation on Gadamer’s hermeneutics as cultural philosophy.
Call for Proposals
For the year 2023, the Hans-Georg Gadamer Society for Hermeneutic Philosophy is awarding, in an amount of 2000 Euro each, two Gadamer Grants for the recognition and financial support of scholarly projects that deal with the published works of Hans-Georg Gadamer in a philosophically relevant fashion or that concern the non-edited portions of his unpublished papers contained in the German Literary Archive in Marbach (DLA) and in small part in the university archives of the University of Heidelberg.
Applications are open to exam candidates in courses of study at the master or magister levels who are pursuing promising thesis or essay projects as well as to doctoral students or those who have already completed their doctoral studies no more than two years ago.
Application materials may be submitted in German or in English. They should contain the following documents:
- a project description of five pages in length (1.5 spacing, font size 12 pt)
- an abstract of no more than 250 words in length
- a cover letter of no more than one page in length
- a CV in tabular form
- copies of certificates and a list of publications, if the candidate has published
- a project-related letter of recommendation from an instructor at an institute of higher education.
The grantees and the topics of their grants will be announced on 13 March 2023. It is expected that the results of the recognized projects will be published by the grantees.
Applications are to be directed per email to the president of the Hans-Georg Gadamer Society at the following address: praesident@gadamer-gesellschaft.de
Applications close on 31 January 2023.