Exploring the relationship between hermeneutics and the arts, including painting, music, and literature, this book builds on hermeneutics from a practical perspective, connecting this area of critical research with others to reveal how it is viewed from different perspectives. International and interdisciplinary in scope, this edited volume draws on the work of scholars and practitioners working across a variety of subject areas, themes and topics, including philosophy, literature, religious paintings, musical oeuvres, Chinese urbanscapes, Moroccan proverbs, and Ukrainian internet blogs. Focusing on the idea of hermeneutics as a discipline that can connect different areas of interest, the book offers an inside view into how the contributors ‘interpret’ it within their own academic remits, demonstrating its presence in qualitative academic interpretations and canonical contemporary research in humanities.

In the volume, to locate the science of language and communication in the most recent philosophical and methodological context that science offers today, we have proposed reconciling two avenues of the scientific process, i.e. the "third-person observation-experiment-algorithm method being the traditional method of doing science; and the inner, first-person insights of contemplative science, in a sense of phenomenological flanerie through unexplored cultural landscapes". The present book targets research addressing the phenomenological aspect of communication and the methodology of linguistic research. The volume may be of interest to linguistic scholars, cultural linguists, semioticians, interdisciplinary scholars, and students of the humanities and cultural/social specialisations.

This volume is a collection of texts authored by an international team of linguistic scholars who provide their response to the concept of 21st century holism in language studies. The expertise of its contributors is reflected in the thematic scope of the book; it discusses topics such as the concept of harmony in interpersonal communication, semiotic and cultural phenomena handled by discourse analysis, selected aspects of religious discourse, and the study of proverbs or educational processes, to name but a few. 21st century holism embraces a solid theoretical base in post-Newtonian physics (quantum theory in particular), and departs from materialistic and atomistic perspectives based on Darwinism or cognitivism, however tempted we may be to allow the inertia of these in Western science and culture. Once a scholar decides to shift their paradigmatic perspective, thinking style, and research methodology, they start to co-build a collective mental representation herein referred to as 'the culture of consciousness'.