Professor Ted George to Co-Chair the Canadian Hermeneutic Institute

In 2009, Drs. Nancy Johnson, Debbie McLeod, and Nancy Moules co-founded the Canadian Hermeneutic Institute (www.chiannual.com) with the intent to bring together scholars of hermeneutic philosophy and hermeneutic research across disciplines in creative dialogue and conversations of philosophy, research, and practice. Each year, we gather with a visiting scholar presenting a lecture series, followed by participants’ papers and group dialogue. In 2009, Dr. David Jardine (UCalgary) was the inaugural visiting scholar and CHI was hosted in Halifax. The institute was held in Toronto in 2010, with Dr. John D Caputo (Villanova), and in Calgary, in 2011, Dr. Richard Kearney (Boston). Dr. Kearney suggested the idea of starting a journal, hence the beginning of the Journal of Applied Hermeneutics (UCalgary hosted, Faculty of Nursing, Dr. Nancy Moules, Editor). Dr. James Olthuis (Toronto) was the visiting scholar at the Halifax hosting in 2012. In 2013, CHI returned to Toronto with Dr. Gail Weiss (George Washington University) and in 2014, Dr. Nicholas Davey (Dundee Scotland) was our scholar. Dr. Jean Grondin (Montreal) was Halifax’s visiting scholar in 2015, and in 2016, Toronto hosted Dr. Kym Maclaren (Ryerson). Drs. McLeod and Johnson stepped down as co-chairs and Calgary assumed sole hosting of CHI with Dr. Moules in the Chair position. In 2017, we hosted Dr. Walter Brogan (Villanova), in 2018, Dr. Theodore (Ted) George (Texas A&M). Dr. James Risser (Seattle University) was our scholar in 2019. A virtual CHI was held again in 2021 with Dr. Ted George and another virtual in 2022 with Dr. David Vessey (Grand Valley State University). In 2023, Dr. Dennis Schmidt came from Sydney Australia to be our scholar and Dr. Ted George was our scholar in 2024 for the 15th annual institute, presenting on the topic of Hermeneutics the Wide World Over: For a Theory of Interpretation Beyond the Context of Tradition.

In these meetings, philosophers, nurses, social workers psychologists, administrators, educators, and other humanity scholars gather in conversations that seamlessly move from philosophical papers to practical aspects of our disciplines that speak to human conditions of living and then return again to philosophy. As Caputo wrote in the Moules et al. book foreword of Conducting Hermeneutic Research: From Philosophy to Practice (Peter Lang, 2015), this is the “hermeneutic situation in the concrete, glowing white hot and jumping off the pages of the philosophy books” (p. xi).

What Caputo was referring to in his Foreword was the actionability of applied hermeneutics. When philosophy is taken to practice, to human contexts, situations, and suffering - to “the great problems that are to be encountered in the streets” (Nietzsche, 1881/1982, p. 78), hospitals, homes, or schools -  philosophy becomes more than words and ideas, it becomes alive, applied, and active. Understanding this very thing was at the heart of German philosopher, Han-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical endeavor and is at the heart of research using hermeneutics. “Hermeneutics, like nursing, requires a practice amid uncertainty and ambiguity, a willingness to tolerate unknowingness and awe, being prepared to meet the unexpected and, more importantly, to respond to it (Moules, 2022, p. 380).