Biblical interpretation among Church of England laity was assessed by questionnaire. Eleven churches took part in the final survey: 1800 questionnaires were distributed and 404 returned. Subjects read the healing story in Mark 9: 14-29 and then responded to questions on the passage, their attitudes to the bible and healing prayer. Liken scales assessed attitudes to the bible, morality, religious exclusivity and supernatural healing. Personality was assessed according to the Myers-Briggs typology using the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. Subjects from Evangelical churches had more conservative attitudes than those in Anglo-catholic or Broad churches. Attitudes were related to education level and the perceiving personality function, and were clustered according to level of conservatism and charismatic belief. Literal interpretation of the passage declined with age. Literal interpretation of biblical events declined with education level, but not among Evangelicals. Respondents preferred interpretations that matched their preferred perceiving or judging personality functions. Those who preferred intuition and feeling were also most likely to identify with characters in the story. Perception of horizon separation was related to familiarity with the passage, and preference for interpretative horizon was related to attitudes, judging personality function and education level. There was little evidence of strong community effects on interpretation. Dependence on others for interpretation was greater among women, negatively correlated with education level and positively correlated with age and personality preferences for sensing and feeling. Findings are discussed in relation to the roles of the individual, the Holy Spirit and the community in shaping interpretation, and to problems of evaluating interpretations in the church. Factors external to the text are important in generating meaning, but are sometimes less valuable in deciding between interpretations. Church and academy are fundamentally different worlds of discourse that overlap: the difference needs to be recognized, accepted and respected.

An examination of the ontological position on which Hans-Georg Gadamer’s views rely, and of its relationship to the views of Heidegger, Plato and Hegel. I argue that Gadamer’s notion of being appeals to a structure he uses repeatedly in other areas of his philosophy in which the communal participation of many finite individuals creates an essential entity that surpasses the sum of their input and is then regulative of their participation in it. I demonstrate first that he advocates something more than an empiricism based on our finite faculties, then that his account of textuality involves an appeal to an ideal ‘text itself’ that is beyond our reach, and finally that this structure is extended to language and this this extension is seen as the basis of all being. His idea of a reality that can guide our conversations towards truth is embodied in what he calls the ‘one word’ or ‘logos’: I argue that this takes the place of Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit’, but is mixed with the later Heidegger’s ideas about a clearing in being in such a way that it no longer completely transcends intersubjective dialogue. Gadamer preserves the metaphysical edifices that Plato and Hegel associated with ‘dialectic’, but denies that they require an ontological commitment to anything beyond Heidegger’s being-in-the-world. Thus being in the world itself must ultimately depend on our participating in dialogue and in society, and will alter as different numbers of people develop cultivated practical rationality. I argue that this resting of ontology on an ethical requirement demonstrates that the original extension of the structure Gadamer detects in language and textuality to being itself is highly implausible, and that this casts many doubts on his use of the same structure in other areas. I conclude by looking at the way in which this same structure he detects in language allows him conveniently to side-step criticism, but maintain that it nonetheless contains valuable insights into the workings of language that are missing from other accounts.

In this thesis I examine the initial stage of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the "I am," focusing particularly on the question of method. / In Chapter 1 I analyze how psychoanalysis opens a space for Ricoeur's hermeneutics of "I am" by redirecting doubt towards the origins of meaning. I will try to show that the premises of this hermeneutics--the analogy between subjective manifestations and texts--preclude strong methodological commitments. / The Second Chapter focuses on the main argument Ricoeur makes in favor of method. His attempt to set in motion a dialectic between phenomenology of subjectivity and structuralism will be questioned with respect to the power this dialectic has to capture the "I" as the generative moment of the interpreted series of subjective manifestations. / Finally, with the analysis of Heidegger in Chapter 3, it will become apparent that the very framework of discussion in terms of subject-object, structure-event, signifier-signified has to be replaced by an ontological approach and that from this perspective subjectivity is ultimately beyond the grasp of any methodology. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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Thesis (DPhil (Philosophy))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This thesis argues that the study of the brain as a system, which includes the disciplines of cognitive science and neuroscience, is a kind of textual exegesis, like literary criticism. Through research in scientific modeling in the 20th and early 21st centuries, anong with the advances of nonlinear science, and both cognitive science and neuroscience, along with the work of Aristotle, Saussure, and Paul Ricoeur, I argue that the parts of the brain have multiple functions, like words have multiple uses. Ricoeur, through Aristotle, argues that words only have meaning in the act of predication, the sentence. Likewise, a brain act must corporately employ a certain set of parts in the brain system. Using Aristotle, I make the case that human cognition cannot be reduced to mere brain events because the parts, the whole, and the context are integrally important to understanding the function of any given brain process. It follows then that to understand any given brain event we need to know the fullness of human experience as lived experience, not lab experience. Science should progress from what is best known to what is least known. The methodology of reductionist neuroscience does the exact opposite, at times leading to the denial of personhood or even intelligence. I advocate that the relationship between the phenomenology of human experience (which Merleau-Ponty explored famously) and brain science should be that of data to model. When neuroscience interprets the brain as separated from the lived human world, it “reads into the text” in a sense. The lived human world must intersect intimately with whatever the brain and body are doing. The cognitive science research project has traditionally required the researcher to artificially segment human experience into it pure material constituents and then reassemble it. Is the creature reanimated at the end of the dissections really human consciousness? I will suggest that we not assemble the whole out of the parts; rather human brain science should be an exegesis inward. So, brain activities are aspects of human acts, because they are performed by humans, as humans, and interpreting them is a human activity.

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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