Since the publication of Wahrheit und Methode in 1960 (Tfibingen), Gadamer's hermeneutics has called forth a varied and fruitful response from the Continent, without receiving anything near the same attention from the English-speaking world. Though E. D. Hirsch thought Gadamer sufficiently important in 1965 to merit an early rebuttal and rehabilitation (Validity in Interpretation [New Haven, Conn., 1967], pp. 245-64), Wahrheit und Methode remained unread in England and America, partly because a translation was not available until 1975 (Truth and Method, (...) ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming [New York]). Even after that date, Gadamer's influence on Anglo-American debate has been largely secondhand, filtering in through such figures as Paul Ricoeur and Jiurgen Habermas. But a renewed interest in the question of what we are to make of tradition, no doubt spurred in large measure by deconstruction's effort to unmake it, has lent Gadamer a new pertinence. One sign that his stock is on the rise is the publication of Joel Weinsheimer's Gadamer's Hermeneutics, a much needed and admirably written introduction to Truth and Method that should push its value even higher. -- JSTOR (June 12, 2012.). (shrink)

In the years shortly before and after the publication of his classic _Truth and Method_, the eminent German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer returned often to questions surrounding religion and ethics. In this selection of writings from _Gesammelte Werke_ that are here translated into English for the first time, Gadamer probes deeply into the hermeneutic significance of these subjects. Gadamer raises issues of importance to ethicists and theologians as well as students of language and literature. In such outstanding essays as "Kant and (...) the Question of God," "Thinking as Redemption: Plotinus between Plato and Augustine," and "Friendship and Self-Knowledge: Reflections on the Role of Friendship in Greek Ethics," Gadamer discusses the nature of moral behavior, ethics as a form of knowing, and the hermeneutic task of mediating ethos and philosophical ethics with one another. (shrink)

Studies of hermeneutics have rarely dealt with eighteenth-century British thought, yet during this period debates over the interpretation of texts plagued and invigorated religious, intellectual, and political life in England. This important book is the first to deal with hermeneutical issues in British scriptural, legal, historical, political, and literary interpretation. Examining the work of Swift, Locke, Toland, Bolingbroke, Hume, Reid, Blackstone, and Burke, Joel C. Weinsheimer discusses common philosophical problems of understanding, concentrating especially on their theories about the application (...) of taste to discern interpretive truth. Weinsheimer's approach is primarily philosophical. In each area of hermeneutic endeavor, he asks such questions as why it is necessary to interpret, what it means to interpret, what does not need interpreting, what constitutes the signs of right understanding, and what accounts for the multiplicity of interpretations. He concludes that hermneutics in eighteenth-century England became the site of a contest and possible reconciliation between reason and history. Driven by the need to escape rationalist formalism as well as an opposite though equally sterile antiquarianism, interpretation offered a new way of thinking about truth, as belonging to reason and history together. (shrink)

In this book, first published in 1984, Joel Weinsheimer advocates revitalizing the practice of imitating literature as a mode appropriate for literary critics as well as artists. The book is not only about imitation; it is itself an imitation, specifically of Samuel Johnson. As both the focus and mode of presentation, imitation is presented not merely as a kind of poetry that once flourished in the eighteenth century but also as a kind of criticism particularly relevant today. Applying arguments (...) from philosophy of science, deconstruction, psycho-analysis, literary theory, semiotics and hermeneutics, Weinsheimer shows that the three main currents of thought responsible for forcing imitation underground were empiricism, originalism and historicism. The three central chapters of the book concentrate on their representatives: John Locke, Edward Young and Thomas Warton. The author then applies Johnsonian arguments – supported by those of Gadamer Peirce – to challenge those objections and re-establish imitation as an intellectually defensible mode of writing. (shrink)

In this lucid and elegantly written book, Joel Weinsheimer discusses how the insights of Hans-Georg Gadamer alter our understanding of literary theory and interpretation. Weinsheimer begins by surveying modern hermeneutics from Schleiermacher to Riocoeur, showing that Gadamer’s work is situated in the middle of an ongoing dialogue. Gadamer’s hermeneutics, says Weinsheimer, is specifically philosophical for it explores how understanding occurs at all, not how it should be regulated in order to function more rigorously or effectively. According to Weinsheimer, Gadamer (...) views understanding as an effect of history, not an action but a passion, something that happens to the interpreter. Gadamer offers a new model of historical understanding that is based on metaphor: it fuses the different into the same but, like metaphor, does not repress difference. Similarly, Gadamer’s critique of the semiotic conception of language redresses the balance between difference and sameness in the relation of word and world. The common thread in the contributions of philosophical hermeneutics to literary theory is the multifaceted tension between the one and the many, between sameness and difference. This appears in metaphor and application, in the complex dialogue between the past and present, and between the interpretation and the interpreted generally. In the final chapter of the book, “The Question of the Classic,” Weinsheimer explores the implications of this analysis of Gadamer’s hermeneutics for the current debate concerning the study of the canon and the classic. (shrink)

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus. Looking behind the self-consciousness of science, he discusses the tense relationship between truth and methodology. In examining the different experiences of truth, he aims to "present the hermeneutic phenomenon in its fullest extent.

In this wide-ranging historical introduction to philosophical hermeneutics, Jean Grondin discusses the major figures from Philo to Habermas, analyzes conflicts between various interpretive schools, and provides a persuasive critique of Gadamer's view of hermeneutic history, though in other ways Gadamer's _Truth and Method_ serves as a model for Grondin's approach. Grondin begins with brief overviews of the pre-nineteenth-century thinkers Philo, Origen, Augustine, Luther, Flacius, Dannhauer, Chladenius, Meier, Rambach, Ast, and Schlegel. Next he provides more extensive treatments of such major nineteenth-century (...) figures as Schleiermacher, Böckh, Droysen, and Dilthey. There are full chapters devoted to Heidegger and Gadamer as well as shorter discussions of Betti, Habermas, and Derrida. Because he is the first to pay close attention to pre-Romantic figures, Grondin is able to show that the history of hermeneutics cannot be viewed as a gradual, steady progression in the direction of complete universalization. His book makes it clear that even in the early period, hermeneutic thinkers acknowledged a universal aspect in interpretation—that long before Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was philosophical and not merely practical. In revising and correcting the standard account, Grondin's book is not merely introductory but revisionary, suitable for beginners as well as advanced students in the field. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joel Weinsheimer HISTORY AND THE FUTURE OF MEANING In "meaning and Significance Reinterpreted," E. D. Hirsch, Jr. offers what he calls a "new and different theory" of meaning, one which radically reduces the role of the mens auctoris as the normative principle defining validity in literary interpretation.1 Clearly this essay marks a noteworthy shift in Hirsch's own thought, though in the history of hermeneutics such a reduction is (...) of itself hardly new. More interesting are the arguments Hirsch offers for this "correction" of his views, and in particular his thesis that in the process of application "responsible interpreters can adjust old concepts to new beliefs" and still say that they "have not really changed the text's meaning. They can properly say this, first of all, on grounds that... the original speech-intent subsumes new contents in the way that a concept subsumes examples, whether or not the examples were available to the original speaker. But in addition to this, the provisionality of speech sanctions a degree of adjustment in the original concepts as well" (p. 223). Application does not alter meaning if the new example can be subsumed under the original concept or if the original concept is itself originally provisional and adjustable. Thus Hirsch now concurs with Gadamer that application belongs to meaning and yet still dissents from Gadamer's thesis that application to situations unlike those the author envisioned necessarily changes the meaning. If determinacy of meaning is to be preserved, the essential question is, how far can sameness be unlike without becoming difference? Hirsch replies, "It appears... that meaning can tolerate a small revision in mental content and remain the same — but not a big revision.... In our ordinary talk about language, our judgment of sameness of meaning is based on our ad hoc judgment about the closeness of two contents" (p. 221). 139 140Philosophy and Literature Since I (and, I think, Gadamer) agree in great part with this conclusion, Hirsch's theory in my view does not need to be refuted and replaced with something new and different. Rather, in the spirit of his essay, I propose to adjust and build on it — by showing first that the development of Hirsch's argument rehearses Kant's movement from the first Critique to the third, second that the result of merging the two Critiques is unacceptable, and finally that Gadamer's reading of Kant anticipates and refines Hirsch's new theory while avoiding its unacceptable consequences. "The first amendment I must make in my original explanation of the distinction between meaning and significance is to reject my earlier claim that future applications of meaning, each being different, must belong to the domain of significance" (p. 210). In this first phase of his argument, Hirsch argues that the details of literary texts exemplify concepts that are themselves broader than the particulars that exemplify them. In Shakespeare 's sonnet 55, "marble" exemplifies what will last long but not forever. Just as the sonnet itself offers additional instances of this concept, so also the interpreter can find still other, more modern examples of it. Even if Shakespeare did not mention these modern examples and could not be said to have had them in mind, yet they too belong to the poem's self-same meaning if they can be subsumed under the original concept and thus belong to its extension. We can always find more examples, then, and in Hirsch's view this means that through its applications a poem can always become fresh again without altering its meaning. But here's the rub: if new instances are always to be found and thus no instance ever exhausts a concept, then no instance ever fully exemplifies a concept. Every example is a bad example, and Shakespeare would have done better to stick to conceptual language in the first place. If this conclusion is unacceptable, then we can reverse it. When the purpose is only to exemplify a concept, the difference between two examples (say, marble and steel) can be ignored as irrelevant. But it is nonetheless real. Certain elements of the particular example must be eliminated before it can be used to exemplify the general concept. But... (shrink)

In the preface to the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson’s poems, the editors remark that “for a modern reader who can recreate the situation in which [“London”] was written, it may still be exciting enough. But to one with less imaginative capacity or historical knowledge, its appeal lies in Johnson’s skillful handling of the couplet.”2 To assist us in re-creating the milieu of 1738, the editors supply the usual notes identifying various historical personages and events which are no longer in (...) the domain of common knowledge. In this respect they follow Johnson’s lead. “London” is manifestly an occasional poem; and its occasion—in part, Walpole’s timidity abroad and corruption at home—like all occasions, passed.3 Indeed it passed so quickly that Johnson himself felt called upon in the fifth edition to annotate, for instance, his mention of “the Gazetteer”: “the paper which at that time contained apologies for the Court.” By 1750 Walpole was long out of court, the Gazetteer extinct, and “London” as outdated as yesterday’s newspaper.For poems like “London” whose contents are neither au courant nor immortal but rather historical or simply dead, the Yale editors suggest two avenues of resuscitation: the reader may either restore the background by means of historical imagination or, failing that, admire Johnson’s couplet art, which perhaps has a better chance at perennial appeal. Either content or form, either history or art—both options require a sacrifice on our part, and that sacrifice is our occasion, our need. Even assuming that the poem’s context could be exhumed and that we could participate once again in all the rage of the “patriot” opposition to Walpole, Why would we want to? The problem is that not only “London” but the Walpole regime itself is now defunct. Yet the same question must be asked of the poem’s art, even and especially if it is eternal. Why are we interested in the aesthetic knowledge of couplets that have been drained of all substance? Is understanding “London” in either case an end in itself? The pure content of the poem is too concrete, its pure form too abstract, to answer our occasions. Thus to understand the poem as either history or art demands a leisure that has no exigencies and is therefore free for the bygone and ethereal.42. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne, eds., Poems, vol. 6, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson , p. xvii.3. For a detailed exposition of the social and political background of “London,” see Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson , pp. 88-92, and James Clifford, “London,” Young Sam Johnson , pp. 175-94.4. John Locke explains the infinite leisure we can take in understanding the obscurities of ancient authors in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. , 2:110:There being no writings we have any great concernment to be very solicitous about the meaning of, but those that contain either truths we are required to believe, or laws we are to obey, and draw inconveniences on us when we mistake or transgress, we may be less anxious about the sense of other authors; who, writing but their own opinions, we are under no greater necessity to know them, than they to know ours. Our good or evil depending not on their decrees, we may safely be ignorant of their notions: and therefore in the reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside. (shrink)

Jean Grondin’s starting point in his impressive book is what Hans-Georg Gadamer refers to as the universal claim of hermeneutics. Gadamer is better known for the limits his hermeneutics seems to place on universal claims. Against the reliance the Enlightenment placed on the insights of a reason common to humanity, Gadamer stresses the prejudiced and partial character of attempts to understand meaning. And against more contemporary attempts to ground Enlightenment conceptions in universal human competencies, he stresses the historicity and finitude (...) of human knowledge. Our attempts to understand the meaning of texts, conversations, historical events, and social actions and practices are conditioned by the horizon of our language, our own historical experiences, and our assumptions and expectations. Still, Gadamer ends his Truth and Method by stressing not only the linguistic character of understanding but the infinite capacity of all languages to find and express new dimensions of meaning. “Language,” he writes, “forestalls any objection to its jurisdiction. Its universality keeps pace with the universality of reason.”. (shrink)

Disturbed by these acrimonious arguments, the authors - former colleagues and university-press board members - embarked on an ambitious project to reexamine a number of major literary and philosophical works dealing with the liberal arts and education. With their discussions ranging from Plato to Rousseau, from Cicero to Vico, from Erasmus to Matthew Arnold, Sousa and Weinsheimer offer not a history of education philosophy but an examination of the present.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THEOLOGY, PRAXIS, AND ETHICS IN THE THOUGHT OF JUAN LUIS SEGUNDO, S.J. JOEL ZIMBELMAN California State University, Chico Chico, California I. Introduction JESUS OF NAZARETH Yesterday and Today is Juan Luis Segundo's most recent contribution in an on-going effort to forge a distinctive post-conciliar catholic theology.1· This five-volume work establishes Segundo as one of the most prolific, methodologically sophisticated, and constructive Catholic theologians of this century. In these (...) volumes he moves beyond the task of reframing fundamental theology in political and social terms that he began in earlier works and undertakes a full elaboration of the theological method that he introduced in The Liberation of Theology.2 Better than any previous work, the recent effort witnesses to the author's range of interests and strengths, 1 Originally published in the Spanish as El hombre de hoy ante Jesus de Nazaret (Madrid: Ediciones Christiandad, 1982): Vol. I. Fe e ideologia; Vol. II/1 and 2 Historia y actualidad: Sinopticos y Pablo; Vol. II/3 El Cristo de los ejercicios espirituales; Vol. II/4 Lineas actuates de interpretacion de Jesus de Nazaret. English translation Jesus of Nazareth Yesterday and Today, tr. John Drury (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books) : vol. 1 Faith and Ideologies (1984); vol. 2 The Historical Jesus of the Synoptics (1985); vol. 3 The Humanist Christology of Paul (1986) ; vol. 4 The Christ of the Ignatian Exercises (1987); vol. 5 An Evolutionary Approach to Jesus of Nazareth (1988). 2 The Liberation of Theology, tr. John Drury (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1976). For earlier efforts at political and social theology, see A Theology for Artisans of A New Humanity, tr. John Drury (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books): vol. 1 The Community Called Church (1973); vol. 2 Grace and the Human Condition (1973) ; vol. 3 Our Idea of God (1973) ; vol. 4 The Sacraments Today (1974); vol. 5 Evolution and Guilt (1974). 233 234 JOEL ZIMBELMAN including theology and philosophy, hermeneutics and critical social theory, linguistic theory, and biblical studies. Continuing analysis and assessment of liberation theory, and Segundo's recent effort in particular, is warranted for at least three reasons. First, Jesus of Nazareth and particularly its first volume, Faith and Ideologies, clarifies Segundo's constructive project. The volume reasserts much that is already familiar to Segundo's past readers : a deconstructive hermeneutic; the elaboration of the concepts of faith and ideology; and an interpretation of the relationship of faith to praxis, efficacy, and liberation. But it also breaks new and creative ground as it begins to construct the foundations of a moral epistemology and teleology, a more fully developed theory of value appropriation, and an anthropology grounded in transcendental-existentialist and process categories. One can only appreciate the scope and implications of Segundo's thought in a critical analysis of this recent work. Second, Segundo's ·effort calls for further discussion because of its inevitable influence on the development of other constructive and critical Christian theologies. The visions of " geotheology,'' "world Catholicism," and a "liberating theology" advanced by Latin and North American Catholics are no longer the preoccupations of a peripheral minority but reflect the aspirations of conservative, moderate, and progressive voices in the Christian church. As part of this constructive task, a growing number of contemporary thinkers are addressing concerns or appropriating categories and constructs developed or elaborated by Segundo.8 His theological breadth and sophistication means 8 For discussions of this shift, see Alfred Hennelly, "Today's New Task: Geotheology,'' America 18 (January 1975): 27-29; and Penny Lernoux, People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (New York: Viking/ Penguin, 1989). Those either indebted to or engaged in substantial conversation with Segundo include Matthew Lamb, Solidarity With Victims: Toward a Theology of Social Transformation (New York: Crossroads, 1982) ; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, " Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation," Origins: N. C. Documentary Service 15 (17 April 1986): 713-27; Rebecca Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1986) ; Alfred Hennelly, Theology for a Liberating Church: The New Praxis of Freedom (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1989). TltOUGB:T OF JUAN LUlS SEGUNbO, S.J. 235 that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ronald Shusterman IN DEFENSE OF ELITISM I One recent trend in criticism, starting notably widi die work of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels,1 has suggested diat literary theory is either useless, harmful, or bodi. This pragmatist line ofargument can be seen to go hand in hand widi contemporary attacks on the distinction between "high" and "low" art, claiming that a rap text deserves die same attention or esteem (...) as a poem by Eliot. My purposes here are predetermined by die polemical nature of this debate. I shall endeavor to show diat tiieory is useful and diat diere is a valid distinction between low and high. I intend to do so, somewhat negatively, notby giving examples—diough diis would be easy enough— but rather by underlining die contradictions inherent in some of these arguments. I shall also deal widi anodier debate, which may at first appear unrelated, concerning die limits of interpretation. I diink it can be noted that the criteria of judgment involved in distinguishing between high and low are connected to die criteria of interpretation which, though diey do not close die open work, do permit the identification of misreadings. If judgment involves refined analysis, then theory is necessary as an instrument of refinement. If misreadings exist, dien absolute interpretive relativism cannot be justified. One might expect me to begin by defining "literary tiieory," but one of my main points is that such a definition is futile. The dieoretical endeavor is myriad. The term theory can be fruitfully used to designate a wide continuum of discourses about literature diat range from pure explication to pure philosophy. I see no need to find a common denominator diat would bring togedier under a single description narratology, stylistics, deconstructionist criticism, and so on. Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 242-252 Ronald Shusterman243 Indeed, in dieir original attack on literary theory, Knapp and Michaels were careful to set aside the more "empirical" approaches such as narratology as not relevant to their criticisms (p. 11). Their basic complaint has to do widi theories of interpretation, and they conclude:... theory is nothing else but the attempt to escape practice... theory is notjust another name for practice. It is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end. (p. 30) The point seems to be that criticism, as a practice, can and must be undertaken widiout die interference of a supposed realm of independent principles or axioms. That was ten years ago. Joel Weinsheimer has recently defended similar conclusions in an article entitled "Suppose Theory Is Dead."2 He invokes Gadamer to argue diat "understanding can and does succeed even widiout die imprimatur of theoretical self-consciousness" (p. 252). Weinsheimer refuses what he sees as the "first principle of the first theorist of literature: that only theory counts as knowledge" (p. 263). This, of course, echoes pragmatist philosophy's new emphasis on praxis as a valid form of knowledge: The kind of knowledge involved in acting or story-telling or teaching or practical criticism is practical knowledge, and if it cannot satisfactorily explain orjustify from principles what it practices, that is not its fault but its nature—even its particular significance.... Literature is to be practiced, is the practice of it, its own practice, and in this light at least theory is merely the self-defeating attempt to abstract literature from its presentations, from the concrete practice diat is itself. (Weinsheimer, p. 263) To those who would argue that any practice presupposes theoretical principles, Weinsheimer retorts that such presuppositions need not be considered as tiieory: "Interpretation supposes a form of life, perhaps, but a form of life is not a theory" (p. 255). I admit to being somewhat confused when he writes that practical criticism "involves tacit knowledge, certainly, but such knowledge is not necessarily dieoretical" (p. 255). I do not think diat what we do when 244Philosophy and Literature reading critically can be assimilated to what we do when, say, riding a bicycle... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DIKTAT OR DIALOGUE? ON GADAMER'S CONCEPT OF THE ART WORK'S CLAIM by John Pizer How do we experience a work of art? Put another way, how does die work of art engage and address us? Hans-Georg Gadamer devoted much of his magnum opus, Truth and Method, to answering these questions, and he takes up the task again in a brief essay entided "Aesthetics and Hermeneutics" (1964). Earlier positions on (...) the nature of hermeneutical reflection, the historical context of aesthetic interpretation and the linguistic character underlying the apprehension of all modes of art are reformulated here. At first glance, the essay appears to be more the summary of a previous epistemology than a venture into new terrain. There is, in fact, almost nothing in this work which seems to contradict Gadamer's previous view. Nevertheless, the closing lines of the essay give his concept of art a dimension not directly perceptible in Truth and Method. This is the notion that the work of art challenges us, on a personal level, to change the course of our existence: "The intimacy with which the work of art touches us is at the same time, in enigmatic fashion, a shattering and a demolition of the familiar. It is not only the 'This art thou!' disclosed in ajoyous and frightening shock; it also says to us: 'Thou must alter thy life'!" {PH, p. 104).1 Whereas Truth and Method focuses on the heightened reflexivity gained in a dialogue with an aesthetic object, Gadamer's citation of Rilke's admonition would appear to turn the dialogue into a command, or at least an unmediated personal challenge, issued by the work of art. 272 John Pizer273 This is not to say that Truth andMethod is free ofpowerful, even violent language in its description of aesthetic experience. In discussing the concept of "Erlebnis" as it came to be the dominant term in phenomenological investigations ofconsciousness, Gadamer represents aesthetic experience as paradigmatic of all experience. Like the hermeneutic circle, consciousness is grounded in the interplay of discrete, individual experience and the experience oflife as a whole. Life as a whole consists of unique, episodic experiences, and yet these experiences only acquire meaning in the context of life in its totality. As Joel Weinsheimer puts it: "An experience is something the meaning ofwhich accompanies one through life, determining that life and being determined by it."2 An exceptional experience is an adventure, which gives a disruptivejolt to the even flow of life. But it allows one to experience life in its richness, fullness, and totality even as it tears one from life's quotidian context. In this, the aesthetic experience has the character ofan adventure: "The work of art seems destined to become an aesthetic experience. This means the person experiencing it is wrenched at one blow from the context of his life while at the same time he is related back to the whole of his existence" {WM, p. 66).3 But while Gadamer's terminology here in describing the experience of art is as violent as that of "Aesthetics and Hermeneutics," he does not suggest in Truth and Method that the work of art issues a command or injunction. Rather, by reflecting on the essence of experience as the dialectic of "exile and reunion," 4 our dialogue with the art work enriches our ability to understand and find truth in life as a whole. Of course, even in Truth and Method Gadamer distinguishes clearly between the silent dialogue between art work and spectator, particularly between reader and text, and the colloquy of individuals engaged in conversation. Nevertheless, he makes it clear that in both cases an openended dialectic ofquestion and answer motivates the engagement. Does the notion that a work of art "shatters" the familiar and admonishes us to change our lives contradict the earlier, seemingly more democratic parameters established by Gadamer as defining the search for ontological truth, and, more narrowly, the attempt at legitimate interpretation? The purpose of this paper will be to demonstrate that it does not. First ofall, we must note Gadamer's concept ofexperience {Erfahrung) in relationship to the text implies an openness to it rather than a detached, objective... (shrink)

My main concern will be to show that it makes sense to speak of the rights of unborn generations against us, and that given the moral judgment that we ought to conserve our environmental inheritance for them, and its grounds, we might well say that future generations /do/ have rights correlative to our present duties toward them. Protecting our environment now is also a matter of elementary prudence, and insofar as we do it for the next generation already here in (...) the persons of our children, it is a matter of love. But from the perspective of our remote descendants it is basically a matter of justice, of respect for their rights. My main concern here will be to examine the concept of a right to better understand how that can be. (shrink)

I consider applications of “AI extenders” (Vold & Hernández-Orallo 2021) to dementia care. AI extenders are AI-powered technologies that extend minds in ways interestingly different from old-school tech like notebooks, sketch pads, models, and microscopes. I focus on AI extenders as ambiance: so thoroughly embedded into things and spaces that they fade from view and become part of a subject’s taken-for-granted background. Using dementia care as a case study, I argue that ambient AI extenders are promising because they afford richer (...) and more durable forms of multidimensional integration than do old-school extenders like Otto’s notebook. They can be tailored, in fine-grained ways along multiple timescales, to a user’s particular needs, values, and preferences — and crucially, they can do much of this self-optimizing on their own. I discuss why this is so, why it matters, and its potential impact on affect and agency. I conclude with some worries in need of further discussion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to BurkePaul J. KorshinEighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke, by Joel Weinsheimer; xiii & 275 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, $30.00.Hermeneutics has until the present study had little application to eighteenth-century England. The omission is curious for, although there were few advances in biblical scholarship during the Restoration and eighteenth century, (...) modern literary criticism begins in this century with Dryden and Johnson, modern aesthetics with Shaftesbury and the Scottish school of taste, and modern theories of art with Reynolds and writers on the picturesque. Joel Weinsheimer’s treatment of this topic, then, instantly possesses originality, not only from a lack of serious competition but because of its approach to [End Page 365] hermeneutics. He “does not offer a historical narrative” of what happened in hermeneutics in eighteenth-century England (p. xi). Rather, Weinsheimer prefers to see hermeneutics as a series of snapshots of how various writers, of whom only a few are conventional exegetes, deal with matters of interpreting texts. In all, the book treats eight major figures (Swift, Locke, Toland, Bolingbroke, Hume, Reid, Blackstone, and Burke), devoting a chapter to each.The method in each one is approximately the same: Weinsheimer produces a reading not of a single work alone but of all, or almost all that an author writes about interpretation. In the case of Swift, for instance, his principal contribution on exegesis, A Tale of a Tub, is a satire on styles of exegesis Swift considered ridiculous. This chapter adds little to what we know of Swift but, in relation to Weinsheimer’s analysis of Sir William Blackstone, we can see that there is a legal background to parts of the debate among the three brothers on the meaning of Scripture. Locke (pp. 23–45) also dealt with the Bible extensively, but his tendency to prefer the doctrine of “sola scriptura” limits what an author can say about his hermeneutics. John Toland (pp. 46–71), in his Christianity Not Mysterious, proposes radical notions of biblical exegesis, and Weinsheimer gives us a lucid reading of the first English skeptical exegete. All the other figures he studies, however, had little interest in traditional literary exegesis. Weinsheimer sees Bolingbroke (pp. 72–102) as a philosopher of history who tried to generate a theory of decoding the past, but he does not clearly distinguish Bolingbroke’s rules for writing history. Hume (pp. 103–34) wrote extensively on exegetical topics without actually being an exegete; although this is one of Weinsheimer’s more opaque chapters, it does succeed in showing the diversity of Hume and his inability to reason conclusively on matters of interpretation. Hume basically did not think that there is any problem in understanding others, so his theories of exegesis are not coherent. So, too, Thomas Reid (pp. 135–65) considered language, properly used, as lacking in opacity; hence elaborate theories of interpretation have little use for him.However, with Blackstone and Edmund Burke, Weinsheimer contributes his two most interesting chapters. The law, as Blackstone conceived of it, is extremely difficult to understand, so his Commentaries on the Laws of England is an attempt to read legal texts “in the context of general literacy” (p. 168); Bentham would later imitate him. Burke, Weinsheimer argues, started as an aesthetician and ended applying principles of good and bad taste to political behavior, always one of the weaknesses of reactionary politics.In a brief epilogue (pp. 226–33), Weinsheimer speculates on the effort of eighteenth-century hermeneutics to understand historical reason, but he does not comment on the failure of the period to produce a single important hermeneuticist. His own choice to avoid major exegetes such as Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds abridges his results dramatically, but a study based on scholarly snapshots always courts this risk. Hermeneutics is a [End Page 366] recondite concept, yet Weinsheimer renders his topic more difficult than it need be by frequent shifts in its definition and a complex, often unclear, style. Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics provides a start, if not a definitive treatment, for later students of exegesis in the English Enlightenment.Paul... (shrink)

In an attempt to bridge the vast divide between classical Asian thought and contemporary Western philosophy, Joel J. Kupperman finds that the two traditions do not, by and large, supply different answers to the same questions. Rather, each tradition is searching for answers to their own set of questions--mapping out distinct philosophical investigations. In this groundbreaking book, Kupperman argues that the foundational Indian and Chinese texts include lines of thought that can enrich current philosophical practice, and in some cases (...) provide uniquely sophisticated insights. Special attention is given to the ethical issues of formation and fluidity of self, the nature and possibilities of choice, the compartmentalization of life implicit in some ethical systems, the variations of ethical demands from person to person, and the nature of philosophy itself as a communicative activity. This study will provide a wealth of information for philosophers seeking a closer knowledge of Asian philosophy and general readers with an interest in Eastern thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Introduction to Philosophical HermeneuticsLeon SuretteIntroduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, by Jean Grondin; foreword by Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. Joel Weinsheimer; xv & 231 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, $25.00.Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, a commissioned study for the Yale Studies in Hermeneutics, provides a comprehensive historical survey of interpretive theory from antiquity to the present. In addition it has a sixty-page bibliography subdivided into no fewer than thirty (...) categories. Unfortunately, the translator, Joel Weinsheimer (himself the translator of Gadamer and general editor of the series) has not added English translations to the bibliography, though he does cite from English translations. The index is inadequate—especially for a quasi-textbook.Grondin sets out to revise and correct the standard view of the development of philosophical hermeneutics: that it began with the formulation of fragmentary hermeneutic rules in the classical and patristic period, was refined with the systematic hermeneutics of Protestant theologians, then broadened into a universal methodology of the human sciences by Schleiermacher and Dilthey, culminating in Hans Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, which extended its reach into a critique of ideology, theory of science, and practical philosophy (p. 3).In place of this story, Grondin presents a single aperçu, “the ancient and perhaps antiquated doctrine of the verbum interius: the ‘inner word’ that is never spoken but nevertheless resounds in everything that is said,” and which he traces to the Stoics via St. Augustine (p. 119). Grondin reveals in his preface that he learned of the centrality of the inner word from Gadamer himself in a Heidelberg pub in the fall of 1988 while he was working on this book (pp. xiii–xiv). Gadamer told him that the claim to universality of philosophical hermeneutics is founded on the recognition of the primordiality of the inner word, to which the uttered word must strive to be adequate (pp. xiv and 123). This interior meaning can never be fully grasped, but it nonetheless provides a prophylactic against relativism. As Grondin puts it in a happy phrase, “original meaning... remains at best the asymptote of understanding, the telos that the interpreter is trying to reach behind the words” (p. 127). In this way philosophical hermeneutics turns philosophy away from epistemology—the concern with the outside, that to which language points, its propositional content—toward hermeneutics—the concern with that from which language emerges, “the conversation of the soul with itself” (p. 139), and the question (p. 119). If Grondin’s account is accepted, Richard Rorty is explicitly renouncing Gadamer when he asserts in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (p. 21) that “it is essential to my view that we have no pre-linguistic consciousness to which language needs to be adequate.”The historical survey is broken down into seven chapters: the first four cover [End Page 249] Classical, Patristic, Protestant, Romantic, and Historicist hermeneutics. Heidegger, Gadamer have one each, while Betti, Habermas, and Derrida are discussed in the last chapter. The historical survey is subdivided into authors too numerous to list. Grondin’s explication is uniformly clear and cogent; both novices and experts will find material for thought in his story.Grondin might be faulted for ignoring the Dutch, Italian, and English humanists, and for leaving Paul Ricoeur largely out of account. The only post-Medieval non-Germans to receive extended consideration are Emilio Betti and Jacques Derrida; the former because his hermeneutic theory precedes Gadamer’s by a few years, and the latter because he is a Heideggerean.Grondin sees deconstruction as “a regression into the propositional logic of metaphysics that dominated the entire West” because it is founded on a destructive critique of propositional logic—whereas Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics is founded upon its replacement by the doctrine of the verbum interius (p. 138). Interestingly, he is also hostile to “historicism,” which—in contrast to Karl Popper—he sees as a positivistic effort to overcome the historicity of understanding (pp. 107–11).Leon SuretteUniversity of Western OntarioCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)