Karl Simms

Biography

Karl Simms is Reader in Hermeneutics at the University of Liverpool, where he has taught since 1989. His research is at the intersection of English studies and continental philosophy, with interests in phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and theoretical linguistics, working within the paradigm of hermeneutics. In the 1990s he edited three books which applied the insights of phenomenological hermeneutics to theoretical ethics, theoretical linguistics, and translatology respectively (Ethics and the Subject, Language and the Subject, and Translating Sensitive Texts, all Rodopi, 1997). Since the 2000s he has been developing a ‘post-hermeneutic’ criticism, which has sought on the one hand to synthesise the phenomenological hermeneutics of Ricoeur with the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer, while on the other hand mediating between hermeneutics and post-structuralism, particularly Derridean deconstruction. These ideas have been worked through in numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of linguistics, psychology, and cultural studies. He is the author of Ricoeur and Lacan (Continuum, 2007) and The Unsaid: Hermetic Poetry between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming 2017). He has also published two books in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series: Paul Ricoeur (2003), and Hans-Georg Gadamer (2015).

Education

Ph.D., University of Southampton, 1988
B.A., University of Cambridge, 1983

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Phenomenology and Hermeneutics; Deconstruction; Psychoanalysis; Theoretical Linguistics.

Books