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The philosophical turn to the letters of Saint Paul in the 1990s can also be read as a critical assessment of the concept of κόσμος , especially in the philosophical sense of order. In this article, it is shown that especially the so-called "meontological passages" to which philosophers such as Heidegger, Agamben, Badiou and Taubes equally turn, can be read in terms of such a critical assessment. The article opens with exploring the stakes of present-day philosophical interpretations of Saint Paul, namely to move beyond onto-theology towards meontology. Subsequently, it is argued why the meontological emphasis of these interpretations are neither crypto-Marcionite nor nihilistic. Finally, an in-depth reading of two meontological passages is offered showing how an interpretation organized around the concepts of κατάργησις and χρῆσις indeed lives up to the stakes of the present-day philosophical interest in Paul's letters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from two diverging lines of inquiry of testimony that characterize philosophy today, this article aims to show what a hermeneutic phenomenology of witnessing and testimony is and how this approach to testimony offers a new framework to understand witnessing and testimony, which also repositions the present-day main lines of inquiry of testimony. The first section offers a critical assessment of the state of the art in the philosophy of testimony today and the second section reinterprets the two main diverging lines of inquiry as a conflict. The major part of this article is devoted to a hermeneutic-phenomenological account of witnessing and testimony. The third and fourth sections describe several relations between subject matter, witness, acts of bearing witness, and addressee, to develop this hermeneutic-phenomenological framework and in the process also shows which place is awarded to the two main lines of the present-day inquiry within this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symptomatic of the crisis of the current global political order are the millions of displaced that have fled their homes but are not allowed to enter the country in which they seek refuge. Instead, they are placed in camps. To understand the site of the camp and the bare life it produces, testimonies of refugees are indispensable. This essay aims to examine and listen to these testimonies by, first, introducing the notion of testimony and some of the characteristics of the testimony of refugees; second, examining what it means to listen to testimony and which role is played therein by the narrative, literary structure of testimony; and, third, by interpreting the form of life to which the testimonies of the camp attest, which several witnesses describe as a life in "limbo." This essay concludes with some brief remarks on the relation between experience, truth, and language in testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dialogue is not only concerned with speaking with other people about something, but also includes a speaking for those who can no longer speak as well as for their opinions. In this first part of this essay, in discussion with authors such as Gadamer, Ricoeur and Derrida, I will show in which sense the dimension of speaking for... is part of a herme-neutic conception of dialogue and in which sense this speaking for... helps me in applying the model of dialogue to relation of the historian to the past. In the second part of this essay, I develop this model of dialogue to account for the historian's activity in terms of the notions of testimony and witnessing. I show how these notions determine the course of Ricoeur's later reflections on the philosophy of history and why these reflections may benefit from a reconsideration of Gadamer's conception of generosity and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The model of dialogue has been of crucial importance for the philosophical-hermeneutic account of interpretation ever since Schleiermacher. In this essay we investigate how contemporary hermeneutics accounts for this model in terms of provisionality and how the attention to provisionality marks the contemporary hermeneutic conception of interpretation. We will do so by first exploring how the theme of provisionality arises in Martin Heidegger's work on interpretation: provisionality appears out of Heidegger's concern with the primacy of anticipation in interpretation. Subsequently, we will show how Hans-Georg Gadamer's attention to dialogue incorporates the theme of provisionality: since no dialogue ever truly comes to an end, every dialogue invites its own con-tinuation. Finally, we will discuss how Jacques Derrida's account of dialogue radicalizes the conception of this provisionality: despite its invitation for continuation, dialogues are radically interrupted; consequently, an additional work of interpretation is needed to continue a dialogue beyond these interruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]