The Healing on the Sabbath parable’s focus on higher and lower standing at a feast affirms humility over ostentation. Evoked is the grand meal given by Joseph in honor of his brothers who, on account of his high and their low standing, could not sit with him at his table.

This chapter defines the field of history by examining both the topics it investigates and some of its long-standing and unique epistemological and methodological assumptions. It points out the unique breadth of the discipline, which has always taken the whole of human experience as its object of study. It emphasizes the holism of the discipline – that is, History’s consistent interest not in particular parts or aspects of that experience, but in the interactions between different aspects of human societies. It examines the historicist tradition within the discipline – the fundamental assumption that every aspect of human life is conditioned by its broad historical context. And it explores the way in which that fundamental assumption has contributed to a primarily idiographic epistemological position – an interest in the analysis of the particular and specific, rather than the general or universal.

Gadamer’s attitude to Collingwood was marked by ambivalence: while promoting the Englishman on the one hand, Gadamer claimed on the other that the fundamental dimension of “hermeneutical mediation” had simply escaped him. In this paper, I aim both to assess Gadamer’s debt to Collingwood and the prima facie strength of his objections. First, I reconstruct steps by which ideas of Collingwood found their place in Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the 1950s, including the central “axiom of all hermeneutics”: the thesis that “we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer.” Second, I examine Gadamer’s main objections to Collingwood, the first one being based on a misunderstanding of Collingwood’s stance, while the second one hits home, and I argue in the final section that at issue here is Collingwood’s claim that it is possible to rethink exactly the same thought as that of, say, an historical agent, while Gadamer holds precisely the opposite view, that this is never possible.

This chapter endeavors to explain Heidegger’s intertwined thinking about death and “the nothing” and explore the ontological significance of this connection. As we have seen, “death” (Tod) is Heidegger’s name for a stark and desolate phenomenon in which Dasein (that is, our world-disclosive “being-here”) encounters its own end, the end “most proper” to the distinctive kind of entity that Dasein is. Being and Time’s phenomenology of death is primarily concerned to understand Dasein’s death ontologically. Heidegger is asking what the phenomenon of our own individual deaths reveals to us all about the nature of our common human being, that is, our Dasein (and what that discloses, in turn, about the nature of being in general). Understood ontologically, “death” designates Dasein’s encounter with the end of its own world-disclosure, the end of that particular way of becoming intelligible in time that uniquely “distinguishes” Dasein from all other kinds of entities (BT 32/SZ 12).

This introductory chapter seeks to answer the question of what Heidegger means by “death” (Tod) in Being and Time – and begin to justify that answer. I take up this weighty topic with some trepidation (if not quite fear and trembling) in part because to say that the meaning of “death” in Being and Time is controversial is to strain the limits of understatement. In addition to the emotionally freighted nature of the topic itself (to which we will return), I think four main factors contribute to and perpetuate this controversy: (1) Heidegger’s confusing terminology; (2) the centrality of the issue to the text as a whole; (3) the demanding nature of what is required to adjudicate the matter; and (4) the radically polarized scholarly literature on the subject. One of my main goals here is to suggest a way to move beyond the controversy that currently divides the field, so let me begin by saying a bit about its four main contributing factors.

In Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange yet once common hermeneutic strategy, namely, reading Heidegger backward by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger’s own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this chapter critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion I reach is that White’s creative book is not persuasive as a strict interpretation of Heidegger’s early work, yet it remains extremely helpful for deepening our appreciation of Heidegger’s thought as a whole. Most importantly, I shall suggest, White helps us sharpen and extend our understanding of the pivotal role that thinking about death played in the lifelong development of Heidegger’s philosophy.

Are robots a tool mindlessly following their programming, or an actor with agency? Are robots inevitable to the extent that we should just accept them, or does regulation have a role to play? And how do we understand our understanding, that is, how do we arrive at concepts to understand human–robot interaction that adequately incorporate different disciplines? These questions suggest that to understand robots and our place in the legal world with them, we must consider subject matter beyond substantive law and procedure. The narrative chapters in this Part of the book provide additional ways to identify the questions raised by human–robot interaction and propose how to begin answering them.

The reformist religious intellectuals of the 1990s and the 2000s sought to articulate a new jurisprudence that drew inspiration from dynamic, reason-centered ijtihad. The characteristics of the new, reconstituted fiqh were meant to include a comprehensive research program of reformism, deconstruction of commonplace understanding of religion and religion hermeneutic, and reexamining religious experiences and expectations. It was also meant to historicize religion and reimagine jurisprudence through the application of secular and scientific tools and methods. The project’s spectacular failure, slowly made clear about a decade after its zenith in the mid-2000s, owed much to the right’s merciless and multipronged onslaught. But that failure – more accurately, its violent obstruction – did not come until after the project of deconstructing hermeneutics and ijtihad had been taken to their logical extension, namely efforts to construct a sustained theory of Islamic democracy.

Far from being a purely speculative exercise, philosophy is important for practical purposes in our discipline, including conceptual clarification of disputed psychiatric terms, awareness of basic theoretical tenets underlying psychiatric classification and practice, acknowledgment and management of differences in values between clinicians and patients, facilitation of ethical choices, refinement of understanding, and sense-making of the patients’ peculiar way to express their own mental suffering. This chapter illustrates the role of phenomenological and hermeneutic clarification in order to shed light on the construction of mental symptoms. In particular, we consider the role of the patients’ “position-taking” regarding their abnormal mental experience in shaping the final form of their mental symptoms. We start from analyzing the difficulties encountered by descriptive psychopathology in the search of pathognomonic symptoms, showing that both apparent (e.g., hallucinations and delusions) and subtler phenomena (e.g., basic self-disturbances) are not specificand risk overdiagnosis or the use of too large and vague diagnostic concepts. A phenomenological and hermeneutic stance is useful to enhance the characterization of mental symptoms by taking into account subtle formal differences, the gestaltic dialectic between the phenomenon and its background, and the way patients take a position toward their personal abnormal experiences.