Andrew Fuyarchuk

Within the context of the Age of the Anthropocene, the author aims to outline the existential preconditions for understanding the language of nature. This is undertaken by using environmental hermeneutics as an example of a social conundrum, which is traced to the barriers Heidegger creates to understanding animals-in-their environment. In response to this barrier to understanding non-human others, the author draws on the anthropological ontology of Li Zehou and Daoist philosophy. In contrast to the tradition of metaphysics that overshadows Heidegger, they think about human and nature within a "one-world view" and thereby provide the conceptual resources to redefine what it means to be a human being from the domain of "being-in-nature." This entails a transformation in the meaning of existence that the author develops in terms of three Gadamerian dispositional preconditions for a hermeneutics of nature: empathetic bodily affinity, receptivity to ambient environments, and imitation as a way of knowing.

The inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics refers to the meaning that exceeds anything explicitly said. This explanation has been subsumed within metaphysical and theological parameters of interpretation with little regard for the implication of Gadamer’s turn to the living language for understanding the inner word. Through examining his phenomenology of the inner word, The Inner Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics reveals its musical (rhythmic and tonal) dimensions and how they function to harmonize disparate orientations in the middle voice, above all for Gadamer, those that underlie modes of cognition in both the humanities and the sciences—a visual and auditory ethos. However, understood as constituting the music of language discernible in the middle voice, the inner word is also suppressed or forgotten by the technological extension of sight—that is, print—and thus requires a turn of the inner ear or auditory disposition. Andrew Fuyarchuk assesses theories of language in evolutionary and cognitive science in light of Gadamer’s insights into the nature of thought, and he employs them to account for a dimension of language that is inscribed in the lingual minds of our species. When recalled by the inner ear, this dimension enables us to think such opposites together as we find in the humanities and sciences together. This thinking together is expressed in a double account of an object of inquiry, such as the one Fuyarchuk puts forward about the inner word in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.