Gregory Loewen

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 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.