3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Flush with meaning: philosophical hermeneutics in Samuel Beckett’s Watt and William S. Burroughs’s naked lunch(2017) Glanvill, Baron Angus PaulHans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has been ascribed a conservative position in relation to textual interpretation. I wish to explore what effect radical texts (texts which challenge Gadamer’s definitions of textuality) have upon philosophical hermeneutics. I chose to work with Watt by Samuel Beckett and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs because both texts challenge assumptions surrounding meaning and understanding, two key facets of philosophical hermeneutics. Both novels illustrate the effect of fragmented historical horizons upon the interpretative process. This observation is accessible through Gadamer’s descriptive theory and allows the interpretation of both Watt and Naked Lunch to engage with the meta-hermeneutic concerns in both avant-garde texts. The close-reading of both novels will illustrate how they challenge Gadamer’s notion of play between horizons, and I will show this to be productive for both interpretative understanding as well as responding to Gadamer’s critics. It is my contention that Gadamer’s theoretical description offers a unique way to read Watt and Naked Lunch but crucially, philosophical hermeneutics is indelibly changed by an interaction with these two novels.Item Philosophy for children : the quest for an African perspective.(2013-09-30) Ndofirepi, Amasa PhilipAn education that does not recognise schools as places for the mere transmission and assimilation of knowledge, but as places for critical and creative inquiry, is quality education. Philosophising with children in schools assumes that children are actively and deliberately encouraged in seeking responses to the questions about reality they raise at a very early age. The practice of philosophy is undoubtedly one of the underpinnings of a quality education for all. By contributing to opening children‘s minds, building their critical reflection and autonomous thinking, philosophy contributes to the protection against manipulation and exclusion at the hands of adults. If education in general must open up to children the maps of an intricate world in a continuous state of tension, then philosophy is a compass for navigating that world. Hence children, irrespective of their geographical location and regardless of their social milieu or state of development of their country, deserve to be equipped with the tools so motivated for. Using conceptual analysis as a tool, I explore the Lipman method of Philosophy for Children by presenting a case for an African perspective of the same. I situate doing philosophy with children in the context of the African philosophy debate. While Lipman‘s model provides the case for the role of rational, logical and systematic thinking in children, the African background promises the raw materials on which the said instruments work. I therefore settle for a hybridised Philosophy for Children programme that marries the universalist and the particularist views of doing philosophy. I argue that the traditional African notion of community plays a significant role in our understanding of the community of inquiry as pedagogy of doing philosophy with children. Embedded in African ―community‖ is the concept of ukama qua relationality, which constitutes a keystone in the envisaged African perspective of Philosophy for Children. I conclude that doing philosophy with children in schools in Africa contributes to the interpretation of the cultural, economic and circumstances of the African situation.Item Encircling the land: photographic visualisations of the experience of a landscape(2012-06-21) Sher, Hilton StanleyThis project documents my process of visual and hermeneutic enquiry centred on the Tswaing meteorite impact crater, north of Pretoria. In my visual investigation I attempt to apprehend the landscape through a cyclical process which involves walking within it, photographing it in 360° ‘visualisations’, editing the imagery and returning, often frustrated, to repeat both encounter and process. The cycle of reflection leads me to consider my circular process itself as a dialogical mode of interpretation and response to the primeval, circular landscape of the impact crater. Informed by Gadamer’s (1975) notion of a hermeneutic circle which extends interpretation and understanding, the reflexive process is extended and enriched through dialogue with the work of pertinent scientists, artists, poets and writers. Landscape is considered as an artefact of deep time, challenging entrenched traditions and notions while considering significant contemporary responses. The dissertation attempts to demonstrate the layered accretion of concept and meaning contained within the visual and theoretical components of the investigation