Jos de Mul. Horizons of Hermeneutics: Intercultural Hermeneutics in a Globalizing World.  Frontiers of Philosophy in China. Vol. 6, No. 4 (2011), 628-655.

DOI: 10.1007/s11466-011-0159-x (DOI) 10.1007/s11466-011-0159-x

Abstract  Starting from the often-used metaphor of the “horizon of experience” this article discusses three different types of intercultural hermeneutics, which respectively conceive hermeneutic interpretation as a widening of horizons, a fusion of horizons, and a dissemination of horizons. It is argued that these subsequent stages in the history of hermeneutics have their origin in—but are not fully restricted to—respectively premodern, modern and postmodern stages of globalization. Taking some striking moments of the encounter between Western and Chinese language and philosophy as example, the particular merits and flaws of these three types of hermeneutics are being discussed. The claim defended is that although these different types of hermeneutics are mutually exclusive from a theoretical point of view, as interpreting beings in the current era we depend on each of these distinct hermeneutic practices and cannot avoid living on them simultaneously.

Keywords intercultural hermeneutics, globalization, horizon of interpretation, premodernism, modernism, postmodernism

Tragedy and repetition. XPONIKA AIΣΘHTIKHΣ / Annales d'esthetique / Annals for Aesthetics, Vol.46. Volume B (2011), 191-202.

Abstract  According to writers such as Nietzsche, Steiner, and Oudemans and Lardinois the tragic culture of the Greeks has become entirely alien to us. They argue that within the Christian and modern worldview there is no place for tragedy anymore. In this article it is claimed that this does not entail in any shape or form that tragic events cannot take place anymore within Christian and modern culture. In modern culture this particularly happens, with no lack of tragic irony, precisely in the domain in which we believed tragedy had been eliminated: (our interaction with) technology.

Although technological tragedies differ in many respects from classical tragedies, they also show deep continuities. Just as in the case of their classical models, the behavior of the tragic heroes of our time is characterized by miscalculation (hamartia), blindness (atè) with regard to the tragic reality and foolhardiness (hybris).Now, tragic events do not automatically raise tragic awareness. Tragedies are characterized by the fact that the tragic heroes – unlike the spectators – are unaware of the fate that is befalling them, and coming about because of them. But most tragedies also have a reversal of circumstances (peripéteia), a moment at which hopeful expectation crumbles and the hero suddenly becomes aware of his tragic position. Postmodernity is another way of saying that modern culture recognizes itself as tragic.

Jos de Mul. Database Architecture: Anthropological Reflections on the Art of the Possible. The Journal of Asian Arts & Aesthetics. Vol.3, no.2 (2009), 1-14.

Abstract: In 1956, the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys started working on a visionary  architectural proposal for a future global society; he didn't stop for almost twenty years. New Babylon was elaborated in an endless series of models, sketches, etchings, lithographs, collages, architectural drawings, and photo collages, as well as in manifestos, essays, lectures, and films. New Babylon envisages a global society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced with a nomadic life of creative play, in which traditional architecture has disintegrated along with the social institutions that it propped up. Unlike most other representatives of the counter culture of the 1950s and 1960s Constant fully embraced technological progress: "Technology is the indispensable tool for realizing an experimental collectivism. To seek to dominate nature without the help of technique is pure fiction, as is collective creation without the appropriate means of communication. A renewed, reinvented audiovisual media is an indispensable aid. In a fluctuating community, without a fixed base, contacts can only be maintained by intensive telecommunications" (Constant, 1974).

However, it is not only because of the use of "intensive telecommunications" and computers that New Babylon prefigures the world of cyberspace. It is also, and more profoundly, the flexible database-like structure of New Babylon. The dynamic, endless recombination of architectonical elements that characterize New Babylon expresses the database ontology that rules our present world. It will be argued that "database architecture" of New Babylon foreshadows the ambiguous qualities of "recombinant global urbanism."

Key words: Architecture, Database, Ontology, Constant, Recombinant Urbanism

"In an era of heightened existential vulnerability and awareness of finitude there is a correspondingly heightened need for new contexts of human understanding. Here we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to de Mul for providing us with a superb explication of the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose precocious insights into the finitude and historical contingency of human understanding promise to contribute immeasurably to the widening of its horizons."

Robert D. Stolorow, Human Studies. A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences (2012) Read entire review

Zie ook The Tragedy of Finitude

Jos de Mul. Database aesthetics. Newsletter International Association of Aesthetics, no.30, 2006, 1-3.

Jos de Mul. Radical romanticism. CafePhilosophy (Sydney), April/May, 2009, 8-12.

Jos de Mul. International Symposium “Aesthetics and the Dialogue among Culture". Chengdu, June 26-28, 2006. In: Newsletter of the International Association for Aesthetics, no.31, Autumn 2006, p. 1-2.

Jos de Mul. The logic of aesthetic development. In: V. Morger (Hrsg.), Abstractband 8. Tagung Entwicklungspsychologie, Bern 1987, 192.

Jos de Mul. Database aesthetics. Weblog Jos de Mul.

Jos de Mul. Image without origin. On Nietzsche's transcendental metaphor. In: P.J. McCormick (ed.) The reasons of Art/L'Art et ses Raisons, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 273-286.