Dimitri Ginev (1956–2021)

When I first learned of Dimitri Ginev’s death in the summer of 2021, it was a shock. The news came through Facebook in a message that arrived in Fall (late September), months after Dimitri’s date of death: 3 July 2021. Delayed reports of death can occasion visceral disconnect and a dark calculus – counting the interval as so and so many weeks ago, just where was one at the time?

It is not as if I was surprised: Dimitri told me. He wrote to say that he was dying, and he told me why (cancer) and I, in the way of old friends, simply did not believe him. Not really or if so, it would take longer than he had said. I was preoccupied, so was the world, with old troubles, the protracted COVID pandemic, too much Zoom teaching, ‘teaching’ students in a NY time zone, for me, in England, well-past midnight, and (now foreclosed) hopes for further common projects. He had a request for me, one I could not help him with, and other concerns kept my attention. I thought of him but carefully took care – he was ill – not to bother him. Dimitri was right about the shortness of life.

When Dimitri’s student and colleague, Jassen Andreev wrote to tell me of his death, I wrote back, formulaically, ‘The small world of hermeneutic philosophy of science is immeasurably diminished by this loss’. Formulaic or not, I hardly overstated the case. There are few who think outside the mainstream box, fewer still in philosophy of science. The constellation of poverty, our indigence, is one Hölderlin underlines when he asks ‘why poetry’, Wozu Dichtung, ‘in needful times’, in dürftiger Zeit? It is the times of loss, whether anticipated or by surprise, that make the point painful: why poetry: whatever for? What boots it, as Milton says?

Shakespeare’s English tells us to say, I shall not look upon his like again. I could quote the Gaelic (stolen from a friend) and I know the German from the chalk of memory, but I certainly cannot summon Slavic words (I am, thinking of the journal Dimitri founded, Divinatio, oddly reminded of Illich’s remark on Glagolitic in his Vineyard of the Text). ¹ But it is the Irish speaking English who spin English better than the English ever did: we hardly knew ye.

Why do we say that? Perhaps to remind ourselves to pay attention where we focused on our own issues, for our own good reasons, fail to see those around us. That is a commonplace, like Shakespeare or folk poetry.

Among academics, passing without mention is no kind of distinction – anyone can do it. In fact, by comparison with other scholars of the humanities or the social sciences, philosophers outdo nearly everyone as they (typically, statistically) fail to acknowledge colleagues. But as I could say, had I my own Horatio of a mind to recall jest or fancy: I knew him.

To that there is everything I did not know – I am told his friends called him Jimmy, not Dimitri and certainly not Dimitŭr (Dimitri made that clear) and I am also told that he (this was true of Gadamer and is certainly true of me) was fond of cats.

I knew Dimitri Ginev as an elegant man, an extremely penetrating thinker, gifted with a rare rigor and, still more exceptionally, of a systematic scope that kept his work at the highest level. That high level could (and often did) mean that colleagues did not always know his work or were, at best, challenged to understand it.

A brilliant Bulgarian philosopher, Ginev specialized in philosophy of science, particularly hermeneutic philosophy of science and focused on the knowing subject, the ‘subjectivity’ of the subject of knowledge (this is thematic for Edmund Husserl and Georg Picht), and coined his own version of double hermeneutic reflection, especially invaluable for thinking about practice, concerning society, applied philosophy, the ethical, the political, the social sciences. And Ginev excelled in complex analysis like Niklas Luhmann with whose innovation and systematicity, if not quite in substance, Ginev might be compared.

The following article was submitted, reviewed, and accepted in Ginev’s living years. This means that this work falls on the shadow-line between a life’s work and the posthumous remainders consigned without the final touch of the author to the archives, be they real or ideal. We are lucky, thanks to the editor, Peter Wagner, that this work graces the published light of day.

In one of his reviews of a collation of works in social science, an array of books that would put the ordinary reviewer to flight, Ginev characterized the books he then went on to discuss, carefully, without exclusion, as ‘impressive systematic efforts in the meta-scientific study of humanities’. The set of characteristica: impressive, systematic, dedicated to meta-scientific studies of the social or human sciences, holds as descriptor across the board for Ginev’s own life work.

In the case of the essay to follow, it is worth noting Ginev’s lifelong tendency, despite being himself a philosopher, to privilege not the philosopher but the perspective of the social scientist quite specifically as investigator, actor, researcher, here focusing on the sociologist and ethnomethodologist, Melvin Pollner.

Ginev was singularly well-placed to comment on Pollner’s work in terms of radical reflexivity. But what is especially valuable for scholarship is the care Ginev takes to situate Pollner within the contextual resources of hermeneutic phenomenology in the tradition of the humanities and not less in terms of Pollner’s own tradition. Here, Ginev not only engages Pollner’s work, including Pollner’s dedicated commitment to ‘misreading Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty’ but situates that same pointed reading within Pollner’s ethnomethodology through his ‘mundaneity’ which Ginev reads between ‘mundane reason and mundane inquiry’, thereby taking Giddens’ double hermeneutics along with Heidegger (and Gadamer) for the sake of understanding Pollner in terms of the nested dynamic to be explored between dimensions of radical reflexivity and Ginev’s own, insightfully systematic, double hermeneutics.