Gregory Victor Loewen (January 31, 1966 - May 2, 2026) was a Canadian social philosopher in the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology.
Biography Born in Victoria, BC, Loewen was educated at the University of Victoria with a BA and MA in anthropology and at the University of British Columbia, receiving the PhD in anthropology in 1997. He held two tenure stream positions in the United States before taking up his academic position in Saskatoon, Canada, in 2005, where he was chair of the sociology department for five years and from which he retired in 2018.
Ideas Loewen's work fits in the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology, in which it is assumed that all human perception is subject to variable comprehension and the coming to a shared understanding of texts, worldviews, and even natural objects and forces is an exercise in the arts and uses of language.
In Hermeneutic Pedagogy, Loewen "aims to expound the educational process in the hermeneutical tradition, but is also an essay on the educational model the author calls the hermeneutical circle of experiential pedagogy. Loewen elaborates a conception of learning which considers the dynamic relations between the conservative, the technical and the moral dimensions of education." The book defines the relationships amongst hexis, or custom, praxis, or applied theory, and phronesis, the Aristotelian understanding of practical wisdom, which Loewen considers to be the aim of learning. According to Loewen, "Customs are reinterpreted, theory adjusted to suit reality, [and] the social reality of tradition is reshaped" as people learn. Loewen believes that praxis, applied theory, has the goal of expanding knowledge. According to Loewen, phronesis, the collective experiences that a person learns from, amplifies the effects of hexis and praxis by putting them into question.
In What is God? Loewen asserts that a combination of human aspiration and anxiety regarding mortality that provides an inclination for religion and that the cultural necessity for religion is grounded in the need for human community. In On the Afterlife, Loewen suggests that all known societies are categorized by one of five patterns, either thinking that the soul returns unevaluated to the world, it returns evaluated, it is evaluated and does not return, or it remains unevaluated and does not return. Loewen argues that the concept of "nothingness" does not hamper ethical efforts to imagine that mortality comes to an abrupt and final halt. His notion of 'phenomemnemonics', the study of objects by which we use to remember other experiences, also links biography and religious traditions.
Bibliography The following is a list of non-fiction and scholarly monographs by Loewen. Loewen has published additional works. Basic Problems in Hermeneutics: text, image, music, world (2026) Insightful's Guide to Critical Thinking (2026) Contrapaganda: essays in a thinking resistance (2026) A Field Guide to Common Ghosts (2025) A Social Marginalia: studies from the cultural hinterlands (2025) What if Questioned I: essays on self-understanding (2024) The Work of Warning: and other essays on the question of critique (2024) Investigations, Insights, Indictments: Critical Essays (2023) The Misplaced Love of the Dead: and other essays in transformative ethics (2023) A Pedagogy for the Suppressed (2023) The Scandal of Thought: impolitical commentaries (2023) Reimagining the Future: a phenomenology of cross-temporal presence, volume three (2022) Represencing the Present: a phenomenology of cross-temporal presence, volume two (2022) Reintroducing the Past: a phenomenology of cross-temporal presence, volume one (2022) On Time: appointments, schedules, calendars, deadlines (2021) Words are also Deeds: essays in public ethics and private aesthetics (2021) On Being Ignored: and other necessities of the examined life (2020) The Penumbra of Personhood: 'Anti-Humanism' Reconsidered (2020) Blind Spots: The Altered Perceptions of Anxiety, Remorse and Nostalgia (2019) Sacred Science: Ritual and Miracle in Modern Medicine (2017), The Bungle Book: Some Errors by Which We Live (2016), Place Meant: Hermeneutic Landscapes of the Spatial Self (2015), The Big Secrets: ten things every young person needs to know about and why (2014), We Other Nazis - how you and I are still like them (2013), The Reason of Unreason (and the Risus Sardonicus of Rationality (2013), Hermeneutic Pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation (2012), Our Memory of Things: a phenomemnemonics of the object (2012), . On the Use of Art in the Construction of Personal Identity: toward a phenomenology of aesthetic self-consciousness (2012), , On the Afterlife: you will get there from here (2012), Aesthetic Subjectivity: glimpsing the shared soul (2011), The Sociological Vision: an interpretive introduction (2011), Fetish, Cult and Disenchantment: sociological studies of the projected self (2011), Three Apodeictic Dialogues: Examples of Conceptual Mirrors in Religion, Psychology and Social Organization (2010), , Becoming A Modest Society: On Distinguishing Ourselves (2009), Social Science Interpretations of Religion: Comparing the Hermeneutic Methodologies of James, Weber, Heidegger and Durkheim (2009) What is God? Musings on Human Anxieties and Aspirations (2008), How can we Explain the Persistence of Irrational Beliefs? Studies in social anthropology (2006), Adventures in the Aporetic: Anthropological Alterities (2005), A Socio-Ethnography of the Academic Professionalization of Anthropologists (2004), Hermeneutical Apprenticeships: Essays. Epigrams, Verse (2003),
References
External links
home site: gvloewen.ca