A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In Beyond Being, Brice R. Wachterhauser contends that this perceived bifurcation in Gadamer's work oversimplifies and distorts important parts of Gadamer's thought. Wachterhauser argues that only by viewing Gadamer's contribution to philosophy as an integrated whole and by reading Gadamer's hermeneutical studies in light of his Plato studies are we able to avoid certain key misunderstandings of Gadamer, as well as to comprehend more clearly the radical implications of Gadamer's thought.
Engage the delightful and inspiring, sometimes rough and rocky road to inclusive and transformative Bible reading
This book offers the results of research within a new area of discipline—empirical hermeneutics in intercultural perspective. The book includes interpretations from the homeless in Amsterdam, to Indonesia, from African Xhosa readers to Norway, to Madagascar, American youths, Germany, Czech Republic, Colombia, and Haitian refugees in the Dominican Republic.
Features:
- Interpretations from ordinary readers in more than twenty-five countries
- Background introduction with history of the text
- Discussion of intertextual connections with Greco-Roman authors
Documenting the development of a Yoruba kingdom from its nineteenth-century genesis to Nigeria's 1983 elections and subsequent military coup, Apter identifies the central role of ritual in reconfiguring power relations both internally and in relation to wider political arenas. What emerges is an ethnography of an interpretive vision that has broadened the horizons of local knowledge to embrace Christianity, colonialism, class formation, and the contemporary Nigerian state. In this capacity, Yoruba òrìsà worship remains a critical site of response to hegemonic interventions.
With sustained theoretical argument and empirical rigor, Apter answers critical anthropologists who interrogate the possibility of ethnography. He reveals how an indigenous hermeneutics of power is put into ritual practice—-with multiple voices, self-reflexive awareness, and concrete political results. Black Critics and Kings eloquently illustrates the ethnographic value of listening to the voice of the other, with implications extending beyond anthropology to engage leading debates in black critical theory.
The publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method in 1960 marked the arrival of philosophical hermeneutics as a dominant force in philosophy and the humanities as a whole. Consequences of Hermeneutics celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century with essays by most of the leading figures in contemporary hermeneutic theory, including Gianni Vattimo and Jean Grondin.
These essays examine the achievements of hermeneutics as well as its current status and prospects for the future. Gadamer’s text provides an important focus, but the ambition of these critical reappraisals extends to hermeneutics more broadly and to a range of other thinkers, such as Heidegger, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Rorty. Forcefully demonstrating the continuing relevance and power of hermeneutics, Consequences of Hermeneutics is a fitting tribute to Gadamer and the legacy of his thought.
Contributors: Elizabeth S. Anker, Christopher Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Simon During, Rita Felski, Jennifer L. Fleissner, Eric Hayot, Heather Love, John Michael, Toril Moi, Ellen Rooney, C. Namwali Serpell
Reading the poem through the lens of hermeneutical theory, Franke focuses particularly on Dante's address to the reader as the site of a disclosure of truth. The event of the poem for its reader becomes potentially an experience of truth both human and divine. While contemporary criticism has concentrated on the historical character of Dante's poem, often insisting on it as undermining the poem's claims to transcendence, Franke argues that precisely the poem's historicity forms the ground for its mediation of a religious revelation. Dante's dramatization, on an epic scale, of the act of interpretation itself participates in the self-manifestation of the Word in poetic form.
Dante's Interpretive Journey is an indispensable addition to the field of Dante studies and offers rich insights for philosophy and theology as well.
Sinéad Murphy’s Effective History presents its reader with a thorough explanation and evaluation of H.-G. Gadamer’s concept of “effective history,” not only as it pertains to the broader range of hermeneutic and postmodern thinkers working in the wake of Kantian philosophy, but first and foremost as a careful and measured consideration of the practice of effective history as a critical method for philosophy in our current times. In this latter sense, the work pushes Gadamer’s thinking forward into new territory and provides an insightful estimation of the value of hermeneutic inquiry.
Murphy demonstrates that the notion of effective history not only stems from a central issue in Kant’s critical philosophy (the divide between the empirical and transcendental, between history and pure knowledge), but that it is best understood through an analysis of the various ways that certain contemporary thinkers fall into the traps and contradictions that stem from Kant’s critical turn.
In this book, William O'Neill, SJ, offers an interpretation of the nature and scope of practical reasoning in light of postmodern philosophical criticism. He charts a via media between the abstract formalism of neo-Kantian morality and relativist interpretations of neo-Aristotelian ethics.
The three parts of the book treat the eclipse of the classical Aristotelian conception of practical reason; the Kantian heritage in the modern moral theories of John Rawls and R.M. Hare; and the hermeneutical retrieval of a moral interpretation of the world. Drawing upon the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, modern analytical philosophy, and the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas, O'Neill offers a critical reconstruction of practical reason which upholds the primacy of moral community while recognizing the ethical import of historical and cultural difference.
The final chapter applies the preceding hermeneutical critique to the question of the distinctiveness of Christian ethics in the writings of Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Josef Fuchs, and Bruno Schüller. This original contribution will be of special interest to students and teachers of moral philosophy and theology.
In Fragile Finitude, Fishbane clears new ground for a theological life through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. On this basis, he offers a contemporary engagement with the four classical types of Jewish Scriptural exegesis. The first focuses on worldly experience, the second on communal forms of practice and thought in the rabbinical tradition, the third on personal development, and the fourth on transcendent, cosmic orientations. Through these four modes, Fishbane manages to transform Jewish theology from within, at once reinvigorating a long tradition and moving beyond it. What he offers is nothing short of a way to reorient our lives in relation to the divine and our fellow humans. Written from within the Jewish tradition, Fragile Finitude is intended for readers across the religious spectrum.
In the first volume, Fragments, Tracy gathers his most important essays on broad theological questions, beginning with the problem of suffering across Greek tragedy, Christianity, and Buddhism. The volume goes on to address the Infinite, and the many attempts to categorize and name it by Plato, Aristotle, Rilke, Heidegger, and others. In the remaining essays, he reflects on questions of the invisible, contemplation, hermeneutics, and public theology. Throughout, Tracy evokes the potential of fragments (understood both as concepts and events) to shatter closed systems and open us to difference and Infinity. Covering science, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions, Tracy provides in Fragments a guide for any open reader to rethink our fragmenting contemporary culture.
From Text to Action is an essential companion to the classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K. O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own theorization of ideology to their critique of ideology.
This new edition includes a foreword by Richard Kearney. It and other new editions of Ricoeur's texts published by Northwestern University Press have joined the canon of contemporary continental philosophy and continue to contribute to emergent discussions in the twenty-first century.
The book situates Gadamer’s hermeneutics in three important ways: in relation to the contestability of the legacy of the Enlightenment project; in relation to the work of his mentor, Martin Heidegger; and in relation to Gadamer’s reading of Plato and Aristotle. Dostal explores both Gadamer’s claim on the Enlightenment and his ambivalence toward it. He considers Gadamer’s dependence on Heidegger’s accomplishment while pointing out the ways in which Gadamer charted his own course, rejecting his teacher’s reading of Plato and his antihumanism. Dostal points out notable differences in the philosophers’ politics as well. Finally, Dostal mediates between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and what might be called philological hermeneutics. His analysis defends the civic humanism that is the culmination of the philosopher’s hermeneutics, a humanism defined by moral education, common sense, judgment, and taste. Supporters and critics of Gadamer’s philosophy will learn much from this major achievement.
Frank Kermode has long held a distinctive place among modern critics. He brings to the study of literature a fine and fresh critical intelligence that is always richly suggestive, never modish. He offers here an inquiry—elegant in conception and style—into the art of interpretation. His subject quite simply is meanings; how they are revealed and how they are concealed.
Drawing on the venerable tradition of biblical interpretation, Mr. Kermode examines some enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels. From his reading come ideas about what makes interpretation possible—and often impossible. He considers ways in which narratives acquire opacity, and he asks whether there are methods of distinguishing all possible meaning from a central meaning which gives the story its structure. He raises questions concerning the interpretation of single texts in relation to their context in a writer’s work and a tradition; considers the special interpretative problems of historical narration; and tries to relate the activities of the interpreter to interpretation more broadly conceived as a means of living in the world.
While discussing the gospels, Mr. Kermode touches upon such literary works as Kafka’s parables, Joyce’s Ulysses, Henry James’s novels, and Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. By showing the relationships between religious interpretation and literary criticism, he has enhanced both fields.
A collection of essays from the International Cooperation Initiative of the Society of Biblical Literature
This first volume in the International Voices in Biblical Studies series stimulates and facilitates a global hermeneutic in which centers and margins fade. The collection explores the global context within which biblical studies and interpretation take place, includes three case studies from different regions, and reflections on the consequences of global hermeneutics on biblical interpretation and on translation.Features
Essential reading for biblical studies students and scholars interested in cutting-edge critical theory
The current global ecological crisis has prompted a turn to the nonhuman in critical theory. This book breaks new ground in biblical studies as the first to bring nonhuman theory to bear on the gospels and Acts. Nonhuman theory, a confluence of several of the main theoretical streams that have issued forth since the heyday of high poststructuralism, includes affect theory, posthuman animality studies, critical plant studies, object-oriented new materialisms, and assemblage theory. Nonhuman theory dismantles and reassembles the Western concept of “the human” that coalesced during the Enlightenment and testifies to other conceptions of the human and of the nonhuman, not least those found in the canonical gospels and Acts. Stephen D. Moore’s exegetical explorations and defamiliarizations of these overly familiar texts and excavations of their incessantly erased strangeness are the central feature of this provocative book.
Features
- New paths in biblical ecotheology and ecocriticism
- A significant contribution to the analysis of emotions in biblical texts
- Class resource for courses in methods for biblical studies, the gospels, and the Bible and ecology
In 1828, G. W. F. Hegel published a critical review of Johann George Hamann, a retrospective of the life and works of one of Germany's most enigmatic and challenging thinkers and writers. While Hegel's review had enjoyed a central place in Hamann studies since its appearance, Hegel on Hamann is the first English translation of the important work. Philosophers, theologians, and literary critics welcome Anderson's stunning translation since Hamann is gaining renewed attention, not only as a key figure of German intellectual history, but also as an early forerunner of postmodern thought. Relationships between Enlightenment, Counter Enlightenment, and Idealism come to the fore as Hegel reflects on Hamann's critiques of his contemporaries Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, J. G. Herder, and F. H. Jacobi. Hegel on Hamann also includes an introduction to Hegel's review, as well as an essay on the role of friendship in Hamann's life, in Hegel's thought, and in German intellectual culture more broadly. Rounding out the volume are its extensive annotations and bibliography, which facilitate further study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy in English and German. This book is essential both for readers of Hegel or Hamann and for those interested in the history of German thought, the philosophy of religion, language and hermeneutics, or friendship as a philosophical category.
A bold new conception of Heidegger’s project of Destruktion as a method of interpreting history
For Martin Heidegger, our inherited traditions provide the concepts through which we make our world intelligible. Concepts we can also oppose, disrupt, and even exceed. First, however, if Western philosophy is our inheritance, we must submit it to Destruktion—starting with Aristotle. Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition presents a new conception of Heidegger’s “destruction” as a way of reading.
Situated between Nietzschean genealogy and Derridean deconstruction, this method uncovers in Aristotle the most vital originating articulations of the Western tradition and gives us the means to confront it. Sean D. Kirkland argues this is not a rejection of the past but a sophisticated and indeed timely hermeneutic tool—a complex, illuminating, and powerful method for interpreting historical texts at our present moment. Acknowledging the historical Heidegger as a politically compromised and still divisive figure, Kirkland demonstrates that Heideggerian destruction is a method of interpreting history that enables us to reorient and indeed transform its own most troubling legacies.
No thinkers have wrestled with the issue of truth and interpretation in more illuminating ways for the Continental tradition of philosophy than Heidegger and Gadamer. Hermeneutics and Truth is a dual focus on Heidegger and Gadamer, but it concentrates primarily on Gadamer's efforts to think through the issue of truth for hermeneutics and only secondarily on Heidegger's thought on this issue.
Palmer principally treats the conception of hermeneutics enunciated by Heidegger and developed into a “philosophical hermeneutics” by Hans-Georg Gadamer. He provides a brief overview of the field of hermeneutics by surveying some half-dozen alternate definitions of the term and by examining in detail the contributions of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. In the “Manifesto” which concludes the book, Palmer suggests the potential significance of hermeneutics for literary interpretation.
When the context of interpretation is pressed to its limits, hermeneutics becomes the philosophical analysis of what is involved in every act of understanding. In this context, hermeneutics becomes relevant not simply to the humanistic disciplines, in which linguistic and historical understanding are crucial, but to scientific forms of interpretation as well, for it asserts the principles involved in any and every act of interpretation.
The two volumes of this investigation into how we perceive sacred architecture propose an original interpretation of built environments as ritual-architectural events.
Exploring the world's cultures and religious traditions, Volume One maps out patterned responses to sacred architecture according to the human experience, mechanism, interpretation, and comparison of architecture. Volume Two, an exercise in comparative morphology, offers a comprehensive framework of ritual-architectural priorities by looking at architecture as orientation, as commemoration, and as ritual context.
The two volumes of this investigation into how we perceive sacred architecture propose an original interpretation of built environments as ritual-architectural events.
Exploring the world's cultures and religious traditions, Volume One maps out patterned responses to sacred architecture according to the human experience, mechanism, interpretation, and comparison of architecture. Volume Two, an exercise in comparative morphology, offers a comprehensive framework of ritual-architectural priorities by looking at architecture as orientation, as commemoration, and as ritual context.
This revised and expanded English edition of Bernd U. Schipper’s 2012 Hermeneutik der Tora incorporates the results of his continued research and writings on Proverbs. For nearly a century, many biblical scholars have argued that the main theological traditions, such as the divine law, God’s torah, do not appear in the book of Proverbs. In this volume, however, Schipper demonstrates that Proverbs interacts in a sophisticated way with the concept of the torah. A detailed analysis of Proverbs 2 and other passages from the first part of the book of Proverbs shows that Proverbs engages in a postexilic discourse around “wisdom and torah” concerning the abilities of humans to fulfill the will of YHWH exemplified in the divine torah.
A distinguished anthropologist and a creative force behind postmodern writing in his field, Vincent Crapanzano here focuses his considerable critical powers upon his own culture. In essays that question how the human sciences, particularly anthropology and psychoanalysis, articulate their fields of study, Crapanzano addresses nothing less than the enormous problem of defining the self in both its individual and collective projections.
Treating subjects as diverse as Roman carnivals and Balinese cockfights, circumcision, dreaming, and spirit possession in Morocco, transference in psychoanalysis, self-characterization in teenage girls’ gossip, Alice in Wonderland, and Jane Austen’s Emma, dialogue models in hermeneutics, and semantic vertigo in Hamlet’s Elsinore, these essays look critically at the inner workings of interpretation in human sciences and literary study. In modern Western culture’s attempts to interpret and communicate the nature of other cultures, Crapanzano finds a crippling crisis in representation. He shows how the quest for knowledge of “exotic” and “primitive” people is often confused with an unexamined need for self-definition, and he sets forth the resulting interpretive paradoxes, particularly the suppression of any awareness of the play of power and desire in such an approach. What is missing from contemporary theories of interpretation is, in Crapanzano’s account, a crucial understanding of the role context plays in any act of communication or its representation—in interpretation itself.
Wresting the language of affinity away from accusations of sticky sentiment and manipulative marketing, Felski argues that “being hooked” is as fundamental to the appreciation of high art as to the enjoyment of popular culture. Hooked zeroes in on three attachment devices that connect audiences to works of art: identification, attunement, and interpretation. Drawing on examples from literature, film, music, and painting—from Joni Mitchell to Matisse, from Thomas Bernhard to Thelma and Louise—Felski brings the language of attachment into the academy. Hooked returns us to the fundamentals of aesthetic experience, showing that the social meanings of artworks are generated not just by critics, but also by the responses of captivated audiences.
What do social critics do? I How do they go about doing it? Where do their principles come from? How do critics establish their distance from the people and institutions they criticize?
Michael Walzer addresses these problems in succinct and engaging fashion, providing a philosophical framework for understanding social criticism as a social practice. Walzer maintains that social criticism is an ordinary activity—less the offspring of scientific knowledge than the “educated cousin of common complaint”—and does not depend for its force or accuracy upon any sort of high theory. In his view, the social critic is not someone radically detached and disinterested, who looks at society as a total stranger and applies objective and universal principles. The true social critic must stand only a little to the side of his society—unlike Jean-Paul Sartre during the Algerian war, for example, who described himself as an enemy of his own people. And unlike Lenin, who judged Russian society against a standard worked out with reference to other places far away.
The “connected” critic is the model Walzer offers, one whose distance is measured in inches but who is highly critical nevertheless. John Locke is one example of the connected critic who argued for religious toleration not as a universal right ordained by reason but as a practical consequence of Protestant theology. The biblical prophets, such as Amos, were also men of their own day, with a particular quarrel to conduct with their fellows; the universalism of that quarrel is our own extrapolation. Walzer explains where critical principles come from, how much distance is “critical distance,” and what the historical practice of criticism has actually been like in the work of social philosophers such as Marx, Gramsci, Koestler, Lenin, Habermas, and Rawls.
Walzer posits a moral world already in existence, a historical product, that gives structure to our lives but whose ordinances are always uncertain and in need of scrutiny, argument, and commentary. The social critic need bring to his task only the ordinary tools of interpretation. Philosophers, political theorists, and all readers seriously interested in the possibility of a moral life will find sustenance and inspiration in this book.
In this pioneering book, Robert Mugerauer seeks to make deconstruction and hermeneutics accessible to people in the environmental disciplines, including architecture, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and cultural geography.
Mugerauer demonstrates each methodology through a case study. The first study uses the traditional approach to recover the meaning of Jung's and Wittgenstein's houses by analyzing their historical, intentional contexts. The second case study utilizes deconstruction to explore Egyptian, French neoclassical, and postmodern attempts to use pyramids to constitute a sense of lasting presence. And the third case study employs hermeneutics to reveal how the American understanding of the natural landscape has evolved from religious to secular to ecological since the nineteenth century.
"Contemporary theory has usefully analyzed how alternative modes of interpretation produce different meanings, how reading itself is constituted by the variable perspectives of readers, and how these perspectives are in turn defined by prejudices, ideologies, interests, and so forth. Some theorists gave argued persuasively that textual meaning, in literature and in literary interpretation, is structured by repression and forgetting, by what the literary or critical text does not say as much as by what it does. All these claims are directly relevant to legal hermeneutics, and thus it is no surprise that legal theorists have recently been turning to literary theory for potential insight into the interpretation of law. This collection of essays is designed to represent the especially rich interactive that has taken place between legal and literary hermeneutics during the past ten years."
"In this work, Professor Fazlur Rahman presents a positively ambitious blueprint for the transformation of the intellectual tradition of Islam: theology, ethics, philosophy and jurisprudence. Over the voices advocating a return to Islam or the reestablishment of the Sharia, the guide for action, he astutely and soberly asks: What and which Islam? More importantly, how does one get to 'normative' Islam? The author counsels, and passionately demonstrates, that for Islam to be actually what Muslims claim it to be—comprehensive in scope and efficacious for every age and place—Muslim scholars and educationists must reevaluate their methodology and hermeneutics. In spelling out the necessary and sound methodology, he is at once courageous, serious and profound."—Wadi Z. Haddad, American-Arab Affairs
An accessible point of entry into the rich medieval religious landscape of Jewish biblical exegesis s
Medieval Judeo-Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible and their commentaries provide a rich source for understanding a formative period in the intellectual, literary, and cultural history and heritage of Jews in Islamic lands. The carefully selected texts in this volume offer intriguing insight into Arabic translations and commentaries by Rabbanite and Karaite Jewish exegetes from the tenth to the twelfth centuries CE, arranged according to the three divisions of the Torah, the Former and Latter Prophets, and the Writings. Each text is embedded within an essay discussing its exegetical context, reception, and contribution.
Features:
- Focus on underrepresented medieval Jewish commentators of the Eastern world
- A list of additional resources, including major Judeo-Arabic commentators in the medieval period
- Previously unpublished texts from the Cairo Geniza
In his attempt to answer these questions, Neusner sets forth the character and the form of the Torah as sung theology. Israel, the holy community, meets God in the synagogue, while at prayer, and in the yeshiva, when studying the Torah—at the moment in each setting when the Torah is received. In both circumstances people do not read but sing out its words. With the written part of the Torah sung in the synagogue, and the oral part declaimed in centers of sacred learning, music provides the medium for Judaism's theological voice.
Neusner identifies a reciprocal exchange between the holy community Israel and God: Israel sings to God when the Torah is studied, and God sings to Israel when the Torah is declaimed. Through the metaphor of music, Neusner offers an account of how he believes those faithful to the Torah meet God in the Torah, and how they should listen to the melody of God's self-revelation. The result is an original theological reflection that will interest all students of Judaism.
Engage essays that are profoundly theological and resolutely social
In this collection of essays, contributors seek to analyze the vision of the critical task espoused by Latino/a critics. The project explores how such critics approach their vocation as critics in the light of their identity as members of the Latino/a experience and reality. A variety of critics—representing a broad spectrum of the Latino/a American formation, along various axes of identity—address the question in whatever way they deem appropriate: What does it mean to be a Latino/a critic?
Features:
- Essays from sixteen scholars
- Articles bring together the fields of biblical studies and racial-ethnic studies
- Conclusion addresses directions for future research
The eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur was devoted to the imagination. These previously unpublished lectures offer Ricoeur’s most significant and sustained reflections on creativity as he builds a new theory of imagination through close examination, moving from Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant to Ryle, Price, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Sartre. These thinkers, he contends, underestimate humanity’s creative capacity. While the Western tradition generally views imagination as derived from the reproductive example of the image, Ricoeur develops a theory about the mind’s power to produce new realities. Modeled most clearly in fiction, this productive imagination, Ricoeur argues, is available across conceptual domains. His theory provocatively suggests that we are not constrained by existing political, social, and scientific structures. Rather, our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world.
Felski argues that critique is a sensibility best captured by Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” She shows how this suspicion toward texts forecloses many potential readings while providing no guarantee of rigorous or radical thought. Instead, she suggests, literary scholars should try what she calls “postcritical reading”: rather than looking behind a text for hidden causes and motives, literary scholars should place themselves in front of it and reflect on what it suggests and makes possible.
By bringing critique down to earth and exploring new modes of interpretation, The Limits of Critique offers a fresh approach to the relationship between artistic works and the social world.
“The translation of these essays by Gumbrecht on literary theory and history marks the appearance in English of one of Europe’s most learned, productive, and inventive scholars. Their range is extraordinary. They show that Gumbrecht is not only a sophisticated theorist and historian of literature, but a master practitioner of cultural studies.” --Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz
To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault's work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault's work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method—"interpretative analytics"—capable fo explaining both the logic of structuralism's claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition.
"There are many new secondary sources [on Foucault]. None surpass the book by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. . . . The American paperback edition contains Foucault's 'On the Genealogy of Ethics,' a lucid interview that is now our best source for seeing how he construed the whole project of the history of sexuality."—David Hoy, London Review of Books
In Music in Renaissance Magic, Gary Tomlinson describes some of these connections and offers a fresh view of the development of early modern thought in Italy. Raising issues essential to postmodern historiography—issues of cultural distance and our relationship to the others who inhabit our constructions of the past —Tomlinson provides a rich store of ideas for students of early modern culture, for musicologists, and for historians of philosophy, science, and religion.
"A scholarly step toward a goal that many composers have aimed for: to rescue the idea of New Age Music—that music can promote spiritual well-being—from the New Ageists who have reduced it to a level of sonic wallpaper."—Kyle Gann, Village Voice
"An exemplary piece of musical and intellectual history, of interest to all students of the Renaissance as well as musicologists. . . . The author deserves congratulations for introducing this new approach to the study of Renaissance music."—Peter Burke, NOTES
"Gary Tomlinson's Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others examines the 'otherness' of magical cosmology. . . . [A] passionate, eloquently melancholy, and important book."—Anne Lake Prescott, Studies in English Literature
An essential introduction for scholars and students of New Testament Greek
With the publication of the widely used 28th edition of Nestle-Aland’s Novum Testamentum Graece and the 5th edition of the United Bible Society Greek New Testament, a computer-assisted method known as the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) was used for the first time to determine the most valuable witnesses and establish the initial text. This book offers the first full-length, student-friendly introduction to this important new method. After setting out the method’s history, separate chapters clarify its key concepts, including genealogical coherence, textual flow diagrams, and the global stemma. Examples from across the New Testament are used to show how the method works in practice. The result is an essential introduction that will be of interest to students, translators, commentators, and anyone else who studies the Greek New Testament.
Features
- A clear explanation of how and why the text of the Greek New Testament is changing
- Step-by-step guidance on how to use the CBGM in textual criticism
- Diagrams, illustrations, and glossary of key terms
A manifesto for the humanities in the digital age, A New Republic of Letters argues that the history of texts, together with the methods by which they are preserved and made available for interpretation, are the overriding subjects of humanist study in the twenty-first century. Theory and philosophy, which have grounded the humanities for decades, no longer suffice as an intellectual framework. Jerome McGann proposes we look instead to philology—a discipline which has been out of fashion for many decades but which models the concerns of digital humanities with surprising fidelity.
For centuries, books have been the best way to preserve and transmit knowledge. But as libraries and museums digitize their archives and readers abandon paperbacks for tablet computers, digital media are replacing books as the repository of cultural memory. While both the mission of the humanities and its traditional modes of scholarship and critical study are the same, the digital environment is driving disciplines to work with new tools that require major, and often very difficult, institutional changes. Now more than ever, scholars need to recover the theory and method of philological investigation if the humanities are to meet their perennial commitments. Textual and editorial scholarship, often marginalized as a narrowly technical domain, should be made a priority of humanists’ attention.
On Interpretive Conflict delves into four case studies where sharply different sets of values come into play—gun control, anti-Semitism, the religious force of images, and climate change. In each case, Frow lays out the way these controversies unfold within interpretive regimes that establish what counts as an interpretable object and the protocols of evidence and proof that should govern it. Whether applied to a Shakespeare play or a Supreme Court case, interpretation, he argues, is at once rule-governed and inherently conflictual. Ambitious and provocative, On Interpretive Conflict will attract readers from across the humanities and beyond.
This festschrift honors the work of Stanley K. Stowers, a renowned specialist in the field of Pauline studies and early Christianity, on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday and retirement from Brown University. The collection includes twenty-eight essays on theory and history of interpretation, Israelite religion and ancient Judaism, the Greco-Roman world, and early Christinity, a preface honoring Stowers, and a select bibliography of his publications.
Contributors include: Adriana Destro, John T. Fitzgerald, John G. Gager, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Ross S. Kraemer, Saul M. Olyan, Mauro Pesce, Daniel Ullucci, Debra Scoggins Ballentine, William K. Gilders, David Konstan, Nathaniel B. Levtow, Jordan D. Rosenblum, Michael L. Satlow, Karen B. Stern, Emma Wasserman, Nathaniel DesRosiers, John S. Kloppenborg, Luther H. Martin, Arthur P. Urbano, L. Michael White, William Arnal, Pamela Eisenbaum, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Karen L. King, Christopher R. Matthews, Erin Roberts, and Richard Wright.
Makkreel develops overlooked resources of Kant’s transcendental thought in order to reconceive hermeneutics as a critical inquiry into the appropriate contextual conditions of understanding and interpretation. He shows that a crucial task of hermeneutical critique is to establish priorities among the contexts that may be brought to bear on the interpretation of history and culture. The final chapter turns to the contemporary art scene and explores how orientational contexts can be reconfigured to respond to the ways in which media of communication are being transformed by digital technology. Altogether, Makkreel offers a promising way of thinking about the shifting contexts that we bring to bear on interpretations of all kinds, whether of texts, art works, or the world.
Phenomenal Blackness examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century Black writers and thinkers, including the growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory. Mark Christian Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, placing Black Power thought in a philosophical context.
Prior to the 1960s, sociologically oriented thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois had understood Blackness as a singular set of socio-historical characteristics. In contrast, writers such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Angela Y. Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X were drawn to notions of an African essence, an ontology of Black being. With these perspectives, literary language came to be seen as the primary social expression of Blackness. For this new way of thinking, the works of philosophers such as Adorno, Habermas, and Marcuse were a vital resource, allowing for continued cultural-materialist analysis while accommodating the hermeneutical aspects of Black religious thought. Thompson argues that these efforts to reimagine Black singularity led to a phenomenological understanding of Blackness—a “Black aesthetic dimension” wherein aspirational models for Black liberation might emerge.
Arthur M. Melzer serves as our deeply knowledgeable guide in this capacious and engaging history of philosophical esotericism. Walking readers through both an ancient (Plato) and a modern (Machiavelli) esoteric work, he explains what esotericism is—and is not. It relies not on secret codes, but simply on a more intensive use of familiar rhetorical techniques like metaphor, irony, and insinuation. Melzer explores the various motives that led thinkers in different times and places to engage in this strange practice, while also exploring the motives that lead more recent thinkers not only to dislike and avoid this practice but to deny its very existence. In the book’s final section, “A Beginner’s Guide to Esoteric Reading,” Melzer turns to how we might once again cultivate the long-forgotten art of reading esoteric works.
Philosophy Between the Lines is the first comprehensive, book-length study of the history and theoretical basis of philosophical esotericism, and it provides a crucial guide to how many major writings—philosophical, but also theological, political, and literary—were composed prior to the nineteenth century.
Today we associate prejudice with ignorance and bigotry and consider it a source of injustice. So how can prejudice have a legitimate place in moral and political judgment? In this ambitious work, Adam Sandel shows that prejudice, properly understood, is not an unfortunate obstacle to clear thinking but an essential aspect of it. The aspiration to reason without preconceptions, he argues, is misguided.
Ranging across philosophy from Aristotle to Heidegger and Gadamer, Sandel demonstrates that we inherit our "prejudice against prejudice" from the Enlightenment. By detaching reason from habit and common opinion, thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Kant invented prejudice--as we understand it today--as an obstacle to freedom and a failure to think for oneself.
The Place of Prejudice presents a powerful challenge to this picture. The attempt to purge understanding of culture and history leads not to truth, Sandel warns, but to shallowness and confusion. A purely detached notion of reason deprives judgment of all perspective, disparages political rhetoric as mere pandering, and denies us the background knowledge we need to interpret literature, law, and the past. In a clear, eloquent voice, Sandel presents instead a compelling case for reasoning within the world.
Readings in Interpretation was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Readings in Interpretation — a volume primarily on the texts of Holderlin, Hegel, and their interpreter Heidegger—locates itself strategically between literature and philosophy. In keeping with this juxtaposition, it treats the question of self-consciousness and reflection on the levels of "theme" and "text." For both Hegel and Holderlin, selfconsciousness and its relation to knowing are explicit themes, but Waminski's readings show that a more disruptive reflection is operative on the level of text.
In an argument that centers on the textual aspects of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit,Warminski demonstrates that the negative moment—which is often interpreted as a prelude to a unified self-consciousness—cannot be accounted for by interpretive models drawn from outside the text—by concepts like the self, consciousness, or the subject. Instead, a completely different practice and theory is necessary. The author's "Prefatory Postscript" at the beginning of the book therefore serves as an introduction to sketch the theoretical basis of the readings that follow and as a "postscript" that explains the difference between "reading" and "interpretation" which those readings make necessary.
The first part of the book regrounds theology in this setting and opens up new pathways through nature, art, and the theological dimension as a whole. In the second section, Fishbane introduces his hermeneutical theology—one grounded in the interpretation of scripture as a distinctly Jewish practice. The third section focuses on modes of self-cultivation for awakening and sustaining a covenant theology. The final section takes up questions of scripture, authority, belief, despair, and obligation as theological topics in their own right.
The first full-scale Jewish theology in America since Abraham J. Heschel’s God in Search of Man and the first comprehensive Jewish philosophical theology since Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Sacred Attunement is a work of uncommon personal integrity and originality from one of the most distinguished scholars of Judaica in our time.
Just before the summer of 1982, French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at Victoria University in Toronto. In these lectures, which were part of his project of writing a genealogy of the modern subject, he is concerned with the care and cultivation of the self, a theme that becomes central to the second, third, and fourth volumes of his History of Sexuality. Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and shape subjects, and in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are formed by these forces but in how they ethically constitute themselves.
In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, Foucault focuses on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman empire, and concluding with Christian monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Foucault traces the development of a new kind of verbal practice—“speaking the truth about oneself”—in which the subject increasingly comes to be defined by its inner thoughts and desires. He deemed this new form of “hermeneutical” subjectivity important not just for historical reasons, but also due to its enduring significance in modern society.
The key point Luft brings into focus is that Husserl's hermeneutic phenomenology is distinct from other hermeneutic philosophers', namely Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Unlike them, Husserl's focus centers on the work subjects must do in order to uncover the prejudices that guide their unreflective relationship to the world. Luft also demonstrates that there is a deep consistency within Husserl's own writings—from early to late—around the guiding themes of the natural attitude, the need and function of the epoché, and the split between egos, where the transcendental self (distinct from the natural self) is seen as the fundamental ability we all have to inquire into the genesis of our tradition-laden attitudes toward the world.
This volume makes two essays by Henry Corbin, the eminent French scholar of Islam, available in English for the first time. Although his primary interest was the esoteric tradition of Islam, Corbin was also a lifelong student of the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg. The first essay, "Mundus Imaginalis, or The Imaginary and the Imaginal," clarifies Corbin's use of the term he coined, mundus imaginalis, or "the imaginal world." This important concept appears in both Swedenborgian and esoteric Islamic spirituality. The second piece, "Comparative Spiritual Hermeneutics," compares the revelation of the internal sense of the sacred boks of two distinct religions, Christianity and Islam.
Zhang's book brings together philosophy and literature, theory and practical criticism, the Western and the non-Western in defining common ground on which East and West may come to a mutual understanding. He provides commentary on the rich traditions of poetry and poetics in ancient China; equally illuminating are Zhang's astute analyses of Western poets such as Rilke, Shakespeare, and Mallarmé and his critical engagement with the work of Foucault, Derrida, and de Man, among others.
Wide-ranging and learned, this definitive work in East-West comparative poetics and the hermeneutic tradition will be of interest to specialists in comparative literature, philosophy, literary theory, poetry and poetics, and Chinese literature and history.
In The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism, Dimitri Ginev draws on developments in hermeneutic phenomenology and other programs in hermeneutic philosophy to inform an interpretative approach to scientific practices. At stake is the question of whether it is possible to integrate forms of reflection upon the ontological difference in the cognitive structure of scientific research. A positive answer would have implied a proof that (pace Heidegger) “science is able to think.” This book is an extended version of such a proof. Against those who claim that modern science is doomed to be exclusively committed to the nexus of objectivism and instrumental rationality, the interpretative theory of scientific practices reveals science’s potentiality of hermeneutic self-reflection. Scientific research that takes into consideration the ontological difference has resources to enter into a dialogue with Nature.
Ginev offers a critique of postmodern tendencies in the philosophy of science, and sets out arguments for a feminist hermeneutics of scientific research.
Diverse approaches to biblical theology
This volume presents a collection of studies on the methodology for conceiving the theological interpretation of the Hebrew Bible among Jews and Christians as well as the treatment of key issues such as creation, the land of Israel, and divine absence. Contributors include Georg Fischer, SJ, David Frankel, Benjamin J. M. Johnson, Soo J. Kim, Wonil Kim, Jacqueline E. Lapsley, Julia M. O’Brien, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Marvin A. Sweeney, and Andrea L. Weiss.
Features:
- Examination of metaphor, repentance, and shame in the presence of God
- Ten essays addressing the nature of biblical theology from a Jewish, Christian, or critical perspective
- Discussion of the changes that have taken place in the field of biblical theology since World War II
LaCocque's commentaries employ a historical-critical method that takes into account archaeological, philological, and historical research. LaCocque includes in his essays historical information about the dynamic tradition of reading scripture, opening his exegesis to developments and enrichments subsequent to the production of the original literary text. Ricoeur also takes into account the relation between the texts and the historical communities that read and interpreted them, but he broadens his scope to include philosophical speculation. His commentaries highlight the metaphorical structure of the passages and how they have served as catalysts for philosophical thinking from the Greeks to the modern age.
This extraordinary literary and historical venture reads the Bible through two different but complementary lenses, revealing the familiar texts as vibrant, philosophically consequential, and unceasingly absorbing.
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