Gadamer’s Orchard - Dr Jessica Frazier

This paper will look at what Gadamer thinks we are doing when we explore unfamiliar ideas, adding new interpretations, and creating new contemporary culture as we go. It will focus on his accounts of education about other cultures, and what disciplines like the Study of Cultures and Religions are doing to reality itself through their work. In the beginning, Phenomenology was often concerned to end philosophy’s ‘mummification’ (as Nietzsche put it in Twilight of the Idols) and breathe new life into our efforts to understand our own living participation in the world. The work of Hans-Georg Gadamer continues these wider, almost ‘religious’ goals of phenomenology in two ways - it reveals our hidden identities as creative conduits of reality, and it shows how different activities like education, cultural interpretation, community building, and reflection about our own health, all facilitate this. We will see that, for some phenomenologists, fields like Religious Studies are part of a larger destiny.
Dr Jessica Frazier is a University Research Lecturer teaching for the Theology and Religion Faculty on Hinduism and Theories of Religion, and for the Philosophy Faculty on Indian Philosophy. Her research explores key philosophical themes across cultures, from Indian classical theories of Being to twentieth-century phenomenology. Her books explore conceptions of reality, the self and the good across cultures, focusing on classical Indian metaphysics and German phenomenology, and my forthcoming books explore Indian approaches to Being, definitions of the material and the divine, and Gadamer’s distinctive “hermeneutic” ontology. She is also the managing editor of the Journal of Hindu Studies (OUP). Her work on Hindu ideas translates them into global terms, so that we can all think in new ways about issues that shape our society: the nature of a good life, justice and human rights, metaphysics, the goals of community. I anchor these perspectives in classic texts, and bring them into conversation with academic philosophy and existential concerns.

[@DrShraddhaMModi]

Very inspiring, my salutations 🙏

[@pauls4711]

great talk! Thanks Dr. Frazier!