Second talk of the 2026-2027 season Bob Fox, LICSW & Lynn O’Neal, LMHC
In December, Lynn O’Neal and Bob Fox will carry the discussion about artifice and authenticity in the direction of hermeneutics through the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Rather than ask what artificial intelligence cannot do, they will explore what human intelligence can do – and some of the conditions which make that doing possible. Gadamer argues that human understanding is a continuous and everchanging process, famously writing, “to understand is to understand differently.” Sharing a mutual admiration for Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, Lynn and Bob will explore how his work can help us think differently about human-being and knowing, and the conditions that make them possible, in the age of artifice.
Bob will explore how hermeneutic intelligibility places surprise and rupture at the heart of human understanding, and how meaning emerges through a dynamic tension between the safety of what is already understood and the disorientation produced by an encounter with something initially unassimilable. For Gadamer, it is precisely this movement between familiarity and surprise that creates the conditions for new understanding and meaning. What he calls a “fusion of horizons” is therefore never a seamless convergence, but a productive collision through which we move between orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.
Acknowledging that we live in a time when the answer to virtually any question is merely a few keystrokes away, and access to virtual therapy is limitless, Lynn will explore the value of the not-yet-known, and its emergence in the therapeutic space through the foundational ethos of presence, attention, and spontaneity. Drawing from Gadamer’s mystery in surprise, Gabriel Marcel’s presence and availability, Hannah Arendt’s thinking as silent dialogue, and Hermann Hesse on being human, she will pursue a phenomenological understanding of that which cannot be quantified or easily explicated, but which is critical to our understanding of what it means to be inthe-world and to be with the other in a shared, disclosive space amidst the distractions and disruptions of our current age.
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Please note that to receive CEUs, you must…
attend all four talks of the series,
complete all four post-tests,
and pay for CEUs. (Link to purchase.)