Secularism and Hermeneutics

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This research seminar will be led by Yael Almog from Durham University and chaired by Dr Sebastian Truskolaski, Lecturer in German & Comparative Literature, King's College London. 

In the late eighteenth century, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. This talk will argue that several prominent thinkers of the era, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. This conception of interpreters as a coherent community helped these thinkers present the Hebrew Bible as a global cultural asset of humankind.

Free and open to all to attend. No registration is required.