The papers given by the prizewinners at the international symposium entitled “Die Illusion des Selbstverständlichen. Rhetorik und Pragmatik des strategischen Umgangs mit Wahrheit und Verlässlichkeit in politisch und sozial krisenhaften Zeiten” joined a list of speakers that featured some high-profile researchers from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Argentina. Together with their predominantly young audience, they discussed the question of how, in times of crisis such as the one being experienced at present, reliable structures could possibly be found.
The symposium was organized by the Institute for Hermeneutics in Bonn together with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Religionsphilosophie and the Netzwerk Hermeneutik Interpretationstheorie and forms part of a long-term program, under which the Institute sets a competition question on a hermeneutics topic every three years in partnership with the Individuals, Institutions and Societies Transdisciplinary Research Area. “With our program, we want to encourage people to address some of the challenges and issues that are relevant today and support early-career researchers at an international level,” explains Professor Cornelia Richter from the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Bonn, who is managing the project.
The question for the competition that has now concluded was written in spring 2017, i.e. in the midst of the heated debates over the concepts of “fake news” and “post-factual.” Students and early-career researchers working in Protestant theology urged an academic debate on the topic of “lying” in the broadest sense of the word: the concepts of distortion, deception, insincerity, whitewashing and fabrication were to be subjected to interdisciplinary, hermeneutic and analytical reflection.
Transdisciplinary research
Given that the issue, far from losing any of its relevance to society, is actually becoming increasingly pertinent to the question of social cohesion, it has been covered since 2020 by the University of Bonn’s Individuals, Institutions and Societies Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA), one of six inter-faculty alliances that make up the overall research profile and number among the key pillars of the University of Excellence. Researchers from all manner of different faculties and disciplines come together within them to collaborate on key research topics of great relevance for the future. Thus the Institute for Hermeneutics at the University of Bonn is working closely with the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Law and Economics.
Researchers in the TRA Individuals, Institutions and Societies study how institutions—such as the market, the law and culture—mediate complex relationships between individuals and societies. Their findings generate new perspectives on both micro-phenomena, such as personality development, decision-making and individualization, and macro-phenomena, such as the world society and globalization. One objective of the TRA is to identify key factors influencing social cohesion, equal opportunity, efficiency, resource protection and the development of individual skills in the interplay between all these factors.
New competition question announced
Just how relevant the issue of “fake news” is to social cohesion in a global context is reflected in the ongoing crises surrounding the US elections and the debates over the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This calls for a “hermeneutics of social culture” in which the truth question is constantly re-posed and examined in accordance with all the rules of the researcher’s art. The latest competition question for 2020, asked by the Institute for Hermeneutics in Bonn together with the TRA Individuals, Institutions and Societies in partnership with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Religionsphilosophie is thus as follows: “What is truth under the preconditions of digitalization? An epistemological question in dialogue with hermeneutics, the philosophy of religion and socio-cultural phenomenology.” Entries close on December 31, 2021.
Media contacts:
Prof. Dr. Cornelia Richter
Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Bonn
Phone: +49 228 73-4171
Email: cornelia.richter@uni-bonn.de