Truth and Experience

Book excerpt: The spirit of this book is explorative. It meets the contemporary challenge posed by experience and truth with a critical openness that allows for the full complexity of these concepts to be investigated.The distinction between experience and truth has become subject to finitude; how then can these words and concepts be defined? What might be understood by experience and truth, when the distinction between them is not transformed once and for all (eternally), but once and again (historically)?The contributors to the book investigate a wide range of questions revolving around this challenge to the contemporary understanding of experience and truth. They do so through the perspectives of phenomenology and hermeneutics, while also shedding new light on phenomenological and hermeneutic thought as such – on the distinction between phenomenology and hermeneutics, as well as on the interrelation between such philosophical thought and other fields of thought and culture.