Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Hermeneutics
- Creators: School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences
Forensic science is tasked with using calculative thinking with scientifically accepted methods of measurement and detection as well as the meditative task of applying their data to messy, real-world events. In order to support my supposition of forensic scientists being hermeneutical workers, three paintings were created. The three paintings can be considered a tryptic of sorts due to the context in which they are presented: forensic science. They each tell a story that is weaved within each other – spatter indicating violence long past, the empty void of a body gone, and the cold decomposition of a victim found. It is the forensic scientist that must interpret each piece separately and is tasked with finding how and why they are put together. The hermeneutical work of the forensic scientist interpreting a crime scene uses the same methods as one who interprets text. A forensic scientist opens possibilities of meaning in the same way that Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle does. There is interplay between the interpreter (the forensic scientist) and the text (the crime scene), questions are formed (what happened here?) and responses are made (evidence found at the scene). This question and response outlook is what make the forensic scientist a hermeneutic thinker.
There is no possibility for an ecological crisis without someone to be in crisis. The environment is not in danger as such, humanity’s ability to persist in it with well-being is. Thus, the ecological crisis is a human crisis, a crisis of meaning. Although ecology is required to understand and address these problems, we must understand the human condition if we wish to address them with any amount of seriousness or hope for success. We will be concerned with the relevance of hermeneutic practices in the study and practice of ecology. By hermeneutic practices, I mean the practices central to the human condition of world-building through perpetual interpretation and re-interpretation informed by one’s facticity. By the study and practice of ecology, I mean the education of ecology’s concepts within a scholastic, primarily university, setting and the usage of said concepts for the purpose of research or societal development respectively. I will argue that the study and practice of ecology would benefit from an inclusion of hermeneutics into its study in the scholastic system by way of developing nuanced understandings of oneself and their relation to the environment, thereby revealing new horizons of possibility in decision-making in society regarding the environment and oneself. To do this, I begin by using hermeneutic strategies in a reading of Gilgamesh to draw comparisons between Gilgamesh’s journey and the development of human society’s relationship to progress. Juxtaposing the concerns posited by the hermeneutic reading of Gilgamesh with Neil Postman’s claim that our contemporary understanding of the world is helpfully understood as what he calls a “Technopoly,” I argue technology has altered our orientation towards the environment in a way that falsely suggests hermeneutics has no place in ecology or any science. Exploring passages from Martin Heidegger, I then argue how humans’ fundamental relationship to interpretation makes hermeneutics the ground from which ecology is able to rise from. Further exploring passages from Heidegger’s work and exploring the etymology of the words “preserve” and “beforehand,” I argue that not only does hermeneutics allow for the study of ecology, but by studying ecology without it we are left in a state prime for mis-handling the Earth, thus making hermeneutics a crucial part of an education in ecology. I close by providing an example of using hermeneutic practices on two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson to display how these hermeneutic practices could be used in conjunction with an education in ecology and illustrate the benefits therein.