Hermeneutics & Feminism

Hermeneutics is the name given to social science and philosophical methodology that seeks to interpret meanings of given social and political contexts and the significance of discrete social and political phenomena and human experience more generally. Traditionally, the term has been associated with textual analysis, mainly biblical exegesis, but over time, and especially in recent years, it has been enlarged and absorbed by a whole range of disciplines in search of interpretive strategies and explanatory power consistent with the scientific method. According to Bontekoe (1996), the evolution and enlargement of hermeneutics has been largely to the good. He essentially argues that hermeneutics methodology in the modern period has enabled practitioners to engage with and bridge the gap between the content and spirit of the age on one hand and the natural sciences on the other. In other words, hermeneutics fuses methods of epistemology with scientific method, applying them to subjects typical of the humanities and social sciences as well as

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p. vii-vii). Intellectual polarization occurs throughout the culture, on issues such as unwanted pregnancy, abortion rights, environmentalism, sex and race politics, capital punishment, drugs legalization, the welfare state, the notorious Bell Curve nature-versus-nurture controversy of recent experience. Interpretation of a position that includes identification, analysis, critique, and characterization of both structure and content of some body or parcel of knowledge is in some danger of sliding into demonization of the Other, thus potentially creating rather than clarifying intractable issues of investigation. Therefore the limits of hermeneutics can be sighted where the critical impulse is in danger of so reifying critique as to make constructive resolution inaccessible. To discuss the feminist school of thought is to absorb a good deal of the hermeneutics project. Like hermeneutics, feminist critical theory aims at interpreting and making meaning out of social, cultural, and political contexts, or more exactly to make social, cultural, and political meaning from the context of experience and history. Above all, feminism is engaged in social critique, but its meanings, as will be seen hereafter, are intended to support active s
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Bell Curve, Hochschild Machung, Arendt's Habermas's, Denhardt Denhardt, Hayman Levit, Sexual Politics, , Copernicus Galileo, According Bontekoe, Thomas Kuhn, university press, kuhn 1962, social cultural, jr levit, shafer 1994, hayman jr, hayman jr levit, public sphere, contemporary readings narratives, narratives hayman, levit eds, jurisprudence contemporary readings, contemporary readings, narratives hayman jr, readings narratives hayman,
Approximate Word count = 3127
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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