Homo Interpretans

Leading contemporary philosopher Johann Michel offers an innovative reflection on the human being. The book presents an interdisciplinary study that engages philosophy, sociology and anthropology, offering a systematic analysis of the phenomenon of interpretation.

Homo Interpretans is a most significant contribution to the theory of interpretation that at the same time rather uniquely demonstrates this theory’s practical contemporary import and ongoing implications for daily life. The emphases that interpretation is not individual but social and also creative and enabling are additional signal assets. The book deserves separate commendation for its interdisciplinarity.

This book is the most ambitious and most comprehensive new approach in the area of hermeneutics.

This well-researched and carefully argued book provides an ambitiously comprehensive and multi-leveled account of interpretation. Drawing on a wide variety of philosophical sources and on multiple disciplines of the natural and social sciences, Johann Michel renews the hermeneutic tradition by showing its relevance to an impressive range of contemporary practices.

This book courageously defends a philosophical anthropology that heralds the specificity of the human condition in its multifaceted capacity of interpretation and thus renews for the 21st century the universal scope of hermeneutics.

Johann Michel makes an ambitious bid to claim interpretation as a fundamental competence of being itself, pushing the scope of interpretation beyond Western, beyond textual, beyond even human perspectives into interpretive regions not yet accounted for. Although anchored in an anthropological perspective, Michel opens wide the trans- and interdisciplinary frontiers to bring hermeneutic inquiry into the era of postlinguistic, posthumanist learning. Although known primarily for his work on Paul Ricoeur, Michel makes a case for the universality of interpretation beyond textual hermeneutics. This is not a work of secondary scholarship, but a paradigm argument, a programmatic case for interpretation as one of the basic competencies of organic life and a primary approach for the human sciences. David Pellauer’s English translation is, as usual, graceful, vigorous, and clear.

This book revives the hermeneutical question through the impressive mobilization of both its history and positive knowledge by developing an authentic interpretive anthropology. Man, placed in a world that surprises him, interprets because he seeks to know him, to give him meaning and to act within interpreting communities. An original synthesis and an opening on an authentic philosophy of interpretation.

It is important to emphasize that this book is a genuine and rich treasure trove of discussions in anthropology and the sciences in which interpretation and meta-interpretation are assigned their proper place. At many places in the book, the reader is confronted with illuminating and insightful ideas that call for further

reflection.

Johann Michel is Professor at the University of Poitiers and is affiliated with the EHESS in Paris. He is member of the scientific council of the Fonds Ricoeur and member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Specialist of hermeneutics and social theory, he is author of many books in French, translated into several languages, including Ricoeur and the Post-Structuralists.