This chapter introduces the idea of commentary on the dialogues of Plato as the practice of philosophy in late antiquity. The thesis is advanced that Proclus’ own constructive philosophy is rooted in his exegesis of the Platonic dialogues. Proclus sees his central task as filling in the gaps in the articulation of the Platonic system as found in the dialogues of Plato as well as the testimony in the Platonic tradition. Plato finds gaps in the architectural principles of the system, in drawing out the implications of the major claims for this system, and in the fine-grained analysis of the fundamental technical terms for the expression of the system. Proclus also argues that Plato’s philosophical system is essentially a theological system and that gods, as revealed in the traditional religious literature, need to be subjected to metaphysical analysis. This chapter also surveys how ancient philosophical scholarship understands Proclus’ philosophy and Neoplatonism generally in relation to the philosophy of Plato.

Chapter 23 presents Grande sertão: veredas as the peak of a regionalist tradition that begins with José de Alencar. Yet Rosa’s story goes beyond this local tradition by blending a wide range of influences: from the Old Testament to medieval knightly romances, from ancient philosophy to hermetic and alchemical ideas, and from epic poetry to the Faustian myth. This combination creates a “universal” regionalism. The chapter also offers a detailed comparison between Grande sertão: veredas and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, highlighting shared concerns. Both novels include a strong interpretive element where understanding plays a vital role. In Rosa’s work, the protagonist Riobaldo faces a series of difficult choices, the most significant of which led to the loss of Diadorim. Struggling with this, Riobaldo chooses to tell his story to a compassionate listener, making one last effort to confront his guilt and find answers to the questions that have long troubled him.

Greek Japan. Placed side by side, these two words give the impression of something very strange, a sort of chimera – half-Apollo, half-samurai; half-Venus, half-geisha – set on a ground that is at once white and blue like the Cyclades, dark green and vermillion like Shintō shrines. How could two countries so distant from each other be joined together to form a coherent image, to give birth to a meaningful concept?

This chapter rearticulates its Romantic origins as a specificity of modern critical philology by turning to Friedrich Schlegel’s 1799 novel Lucinde and Schleiermacher’s 1800 reading thereof in Confidential Letters on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde. It discerns in this pair of texts a founding scene of critical philology, in which the rules and criteria for interpretation are no longer assumed to be given in advance but are rather derived from the practice of the text in question. König distinguishes such philological practice in early Romanticism in Germany from later positivist philological practices in the nineteenth century. He traces the return and repetition of such critical hermeneutics in the work of late twentieth- to twenty-first-century philologists known for work on corpuses ranging from Greek tragedy to Paul Celan’s poetry to Sanskrit classics and their legacy in modern India, namely Peter Szondi, Jean Bollack, and Sheldon Pollock. He thus demonstrates the legacy of Romantic philology for the reading of world literature.

Alongside Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, Kierkegaard is a true master of the hermeneutics of suspicion. However, more than any other master of suspicion, Kierkegaard is keenly aware of suspicion’s potential existential and even epistemic dangers. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard warns that if suspicion becomes an exclusive mode of critique, rather than effectively exposing dogmatism, it can harden into a kind of hermeneutical dogmatism of its own. By contrast, he argues that love sees deeper than suspicion and is less susceptible to deception. This claim seems naive at best and dangerous at worst – something that the masters of suspicion would identify as illusion and internalized oppression. In this chapter, however, I offer extended analyses of Kierkegaard’s “suspicion of suspicion” and two of his most controversial prescriptions: (1) presupposing love and (2) finding mitigating explanations. I argue that, far from dismantling suspicion, these practices are designed to rehabilitate readers from hermeneutical dogmatism and thereby preserve suspicion’s justice-seeking capacities.

Although the concept of concept did not play a central role in twentieth-century phenomenology, what Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty thought about concepts can be inferred indirectly from what they did say about understanding, cognition and judgement. Heidegger’s approach to cognition by way of a phenomenology of assertion, for example, implies an identification of concepts with the meanings of words. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty stresses the dependence of conceptual thought on perceptual experience and bodily skill. Concepts play a more prominent role in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, particularly in his distinction between the essential ongoing formation of concepts in the interpretation of texts, and their methodical application in the natural sciences.

William James dedicates two lectures of his Varieties of Religious Experience to what he calls “The Sick Soul.” In these lectures, William combines pragmatist insights, anecdotal commentary, and examples from literary history to explore the phenomenon of human suffering. James, I argue, stresses a hermeneutics of suffering that does not inevitably comply with the promise of an experiential openness towards understanding. Rather, he treats suffering both a source of and a challenge to such an openness, and he thus offers an understanding of suffering that is indicative of a larger discourse in philosophical thinking. In a comparative reading of James’s Varieties, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s struggle with the death of his son Waldo, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, I will discuss suffering as a way of understanding that allows us, in turn, to make suffering accessible to understanding as such. James, Emerson, and Gadamer remind us that suffering is neither self-serving nor self-sufficient. As it marks an impaired connectivity within the self and between self and world, hermeneutics of suffering expresses a failed sense of connectivity and conditions the sufferer’s reconnection with the social world. Both in reading and in writing, James, Emerson, and Gadamer recurrently turn to literary and philosophical imagination to test the limits of action and passion, of doing and enduring, to center suffering as a hermeneutic process that may be unavoidable in the human experience, but that always already entails the conditions of its own overcoming.

This chapter lays out two key tasks in reading Scripture that Augustine identifies in the Confessions, and especially in his exegesis of Genesis: “the task of grasping meaning” and “the task of grasping truth.” The first task is that of discerning authorial intention; the second is that of “seeing for oneself that what the author is saying is in fact the case.” The task of grasping meaning is difficult in part because of the peculiar character of the Scriptures; they are both accessible to all, using ordinary language (which is open to misinterpretation), and yet full of profundities that only the wisest readers can come to appreciate. It is also difficult because we cannot really know what is in another person’s mind; any judgments about authorial intention are provisional at best, and only pride would claim to have identified the uniquely correct interpretation. The task of grasping truth is likewise difficult. When it comes to intelligible realities, Truth speaks inwardly, not through any text, even that of Scripture. When it comes to historical realities, including the central truths about the life of the Incarnate Word, we cannot have knowledge in the fullest sense.

In the 1960s, Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer discovered a wealth of hitherto unknown manuscripts and sketches by Webern, including source materials for more than 130 works and arrangements dating from his earliest compositional beginnings to the year he completed his formative studies with Arnold Schoenberg (c. 1899–1908). This introduction outlines how this monograph seeks to contribute to ongoing scholarly efforts to understand Webern’s early work more than a half-century after the Moldenhauers’ sensational finds. Moreover, it makes a case that Webern’s early compositions provide a pertinent opportunity to rethink the category of earliness. An uncritical shibboleth in Webern scholarship, and neglected in musicological discourse at large, earliness, it is suggested, poses an attractive counter-paradigm to the well-established category of lateness, especially when conceived of as explicating the essence of a body of so-called juvenilia and its constitutive tensions.

The chapter shows how Vico’s ghost, and the maker’s knowledge tradition, crossed diverse phenomenological and hermeneutical projects and a few generations of scholars, from Wilhelm Dilthey to the mature Edmund Husserl, from Husserl to Martin Heidegger, and from Heidegger to Hans-Georg Gadamer and neo-humanist scholars such as Ernesto Grassi. As in the cases discussed in Chapters 1–6, what links all these figures is not always a direct acquaintance with Vico’s scholarship (although many were) a philosophical challenge to the Cartesian cogito and, more specifically, Kant’s problematic prioritisation of the intellect over human praxis.