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& Chapter 7 Hermeneutics and the Migration of Philosophical Traditions in East Asia1 Cristal Huang Among the European philosophical traditions that have a presence in East Asia, continental philosophy and especially hermeneutics have a particularly strong following. Beginning in the mid-1980s, for example, a number of major Western texts—by Walter Benjamin, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and Richard Rorty—became available in Chinese translation, and this interest shows no sign of abating.2 In the present essay, I want to look at how those texts that focus on hermeneutics have been introduced, and arguably have migrated, into the East Asian milieu (specifically that of Taiwan) and ask how it is that the hermeneutical method has come to have such a place. The view that I present is that, given the current situation in philosophical education in Taiwan concerning both Western and Eastern histories of philosophy and the need to analyze this situation as Taiwan goes into the new century, it is important to go beyond differences of philosophical school in order to do research. This requires outlining a practical process about how to use hermeneutics in Asia. Outlining such a process will tell us something about the hermeneutical method, about how scholars and students understand that method, and about how they have employed it. This may also tell 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at a round table organized by the World Union of Catholic Philosophical Societies, on the theme of “Philosophy and Dialogue of Religions and Cultures ,” during the 22nd World Congress of Philosophy in, Seoul, Korea, August 2008. I am grateful to the audience for the comments on that paper. 2 Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences [Jie shi xue yu ren wen ke xue] and Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Zhe xue he zi ran zhi jing] appeared in 1987, and Gadamer’s Truth and Method (excerpts of which were published in 1987 as well) was translated by Hong Handing in two volumes in Taipei in 1993 and 1995. For some of the issues involved in such translations, see Tak-hung Leo Chan, Twentieth-century Chinese Translation Theory: Modes, Issues and Debates (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004). 156 Huang us something about whether hermeneutics is a way of ‘bridging’ Asian and Western traditions, and whether it is a useful method in teaching Western thought to a broadly Chinese culture. 1. Teaching Hermeneutics in East Asia: The Example of Taiwan In its modern form, hermeneutics originated with Friedrich Schleiermacher in the early 19th century, and it is a general method that may focus on both the grammatical or technical and the psychological sides of a text, and that may also look at an author’s style in the process of reaching some understanding. Hermeneutics has been taught in Taiwan from the early 1980s, and there have been an increasing number of scholars working in the field. Taiwanese philosophers and their students are familiar with hermeneutics primarily through the study of Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Some concentrate on the ‘Western’ side of the debate between Gadamer and Jurgen Habermas, but some work on hermeneutics in relation to Chinese philosophy and Buddhism. One may well ask why, exactly, hermeneutics has come to have this place. For some, the study of hermeneutics may provide an introduction to new ideas as well as a method— for example, the hermeneutical circle3 —that can serve as a general way of approaching many fields in the humanities, not just philosophy . In doing so, however, it shows how philosophy is fundamentally linked with other fields. But the interest in hermeneutics also reflects an important question for many philosophers in Taiwan. Given that Taiwanese scholars use Chinese, with its distinctive grammar and semantics, to understand and talk about the world, it allows us to consider the question whether this grammar and semantics brings people a different understanding of the world in comparison with the approach taken by Western philosophers. There is, arguably, another, deeper, question as well: can Asian scholars understand hermeneutics through and in Chinese? But because most Taiwanese scholars who work on hermeneutics read the original German, French and English texts, I will not address this here. In this chapter, I will focus only on the issue of introducing and teaching hermeneutics in the East Asian context, specifically Taiwan. 3 The hermeneutical circle is the description of the interpretative process whereby a text as a whole is...

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