In this article, Barbara Applebaum examines “the inability to disagree claim” as it arises in objections made by those who want to ban “critical race theory” from being taught in schools and universities. Employing insights from the recent scholarship around willful hermeneutical ignorance, she discerns the important role that marginalized conceptual resources play in conditions of just and constructive dialogue. When such resources are misinterpreted and denied uptake, the resulting harm impedes the epistemic agency of marginally situated (...) knowers. Applebaum claims that many high-profile anti–“critical race theory” arguments put forth by politicians, scholars, and others are a form of willful hermeneutical ignorance, and she concludes by showing how more just communications, in which disagreement is distinguishable from dismissal, can be achieved. (shrink)

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with (...) attention to the way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

Climate science denial results from ignorance and perpetuates ignorance about scientific facts and methods of inquiry. In this paper, I explore climate science denial as a type of active ignorance...

Centering Epistemic Injustice asks what it means for accounts of epistemic injustice to take seriously the lives and perspectives of socially marginalized knowers and the strategies that marginalized knowers use to circumvent persistent testimonial injustice.

I will argue that the diminishment of hip hop music as a hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx persons by white supremacy promotes the ubiquity of ignorance of racial injustice in North America. To this end, I will defend what I call the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis. According to this thesis, white supremacy has diminished hip hop as a hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx persons. To defend this thesis, I will substantiate two sub-theses. The first is the (...) prescriptive-rap sub-thesis. According to this sub-thesis, white supremacy has caused prescriptive rap to predominate the content of hip hop in comparison to descriptive rap. The second sub-thesis is the descriptive-rap sub-thesis. According to this sub-thesis, if (i) hip hop can have prescriptive or descriptive content, (ii) hip hop is a poorer hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx people with prescriptive content and (iii) hip hop is dominated by rap music with prescriptive content, then (iv) hip hop is a poorer hermeneutical resource for Black and Latinx people. The defense that I present of the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis will take the following form. If (P) the prescriptive-rap sub-thesis is true and the descriptive-rap sub-thesis is true, then (C) the hermeneutical-diminishment thesis is true. I show that (P), thus (C) obtains. (shrink)

Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy is the first volume of essays dedicated to the whole question of self-knowledge and its role in Platonic philosophy. It brings together established and rising scholars from every interpretative school of Plato studies, and a variety of texts from across Plato's corpus - including the classic discussions of self-knowledge in the Charmides and Alcibiades I, and dialogues such as the Republic, Theaetetus, and Theages, which are not often enough mined for insights (...) about this crucial philosophical topic. The rich variety of readings and hermeneutical methods allows for an encompassing view of the relevant scholarly debates. The volume is intended to serve as a standard resource for further research on Plato's treatment of self-knowledge, and will highlight the relevance of Plato's thought to contemporary debates on selfhood, self-reflection and subjectivity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to Amos Yong's "Ignorance, Knowledge, and Omniscience"Dennis HirotaAmos Yong has provided a detailed outline for a comparison of parallel topics in Shinran and Calvinist thought, as well as reflections on epistemological issues he believes confront both traditions in similar ways. I have long sensed that the turn of thought by which the Augustinian problematic of predestination and free will became the Calvinist idea of unconditional election reflects (...) a kind of thoroughgoing critique of self-power characteristic of Japanese Pure Land perceptions. Nevertheless, in this limited reply, I will focus chiefly on the understanding of Shinran in Yong's paper.In my chapter in The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science, as well as my essay above, both of which Yong responds to, I suggest that the dominant Western paradigms for approaching Shinran have tended to obscure what is salient in his thought by presupposing the nature of religious engagement and focusing on conceptual analogues to Western ideas. For Shinran, however, self-power and Other Power are not simply subjective attitudes of the practitioner toward doctrinal teachings, but distinct modes of human existence; between them lies a transformative shift that Shinran terms the realization of shinjin. Thus, I wonder if, despite the resemblances Yong sets forth in his treatment of the Calvinist TULIP, Shinran's concern with the overcoming of the false reification of self and attainment, in some sense, of nondiscriminative wisdom or reality does not indicate a significant and persistent dissonance at the core of the thinking of the two religious figures.It appears that the central concern in the Calvinist narrative is the relationship between human beings and God as agents of will. From the bedrock predicament of estrangement and need for reconciliation emerges the problems of sin, election, atonement, grace, and preservation from apostasy. Although noteworthy structural analogies between the traditions might be pursued, of these terms, it is only grace, perhaps, that has an unforced counterpart in Shinran's thought. Amida Buddha is not sinned against and does not select, judge, make righteous, or forgive. The dilemma that beings face is not disobedience and expiation, but the pain arising from clinging to a delusional self, one falsely imagined to be an enduring, transcendent subject and autonomous agent.For this reason, moreover, Shinran's stance in his writings might better be characterized as phenomenological and hermeneutical than epistemological. When he [End Page 211] states, "Whether the nembutsu is truly the seed for being born in the Pure Land, or whether it is a karmic act that causes one to fall into hell, I do not know," he is manifesting a world of lived experience and challenging ontological presuppositions. From a Shin perspective, modern scientific knowledge belongs among human modes of apprehending the world but does not displace all others or resolve fundamental ignorance. Yong repeatedly refers to the notion of the last dharma-age, as though the times were a distorting medium that condemns its human inhabitants to lives of dissoluteness. Rather, for Shinran, human existence itself is irrevocably conditioned, and salvation lies in being pervaded by wisdom-compassion while remaining possessed of falsity and afflicting attachment. [End Page 212]Dennis HirotaRyukoku UniversityCopyright © 2011 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

Recent works by feminist and social epistemologists have carefully mapped the contours of epistemic injustice, including gaslighting and prejudicial credibility deficits, prejudicial credibility excesses, willful hermeneutical ignorance, discursive injustices, contributory injustice, and epistemic exploitation. As we look at this burgeoning literature, attention has been concentrated mainly in four areas in descending order of emphasis: phenomena of epistemic injustice themselves, including the nature of wrongdoings involved, attendant consequences and repercussions, individual and structural changes for prevention or mitigation, and (...) restorative, restitutive, or retributive responses. This project urges greater attention to the last of these, and to that end offers a relational approach to epistemic justice drawing upon Margaret Walker’s work on moral repair and reparative justice. In developing and enacting better epistemic practices, how can such practices be made meaningfully restorative: not only recognizing the prospects for epistemic improvement, but responding to the perpetration and experience of epistemic injustice with effective epistemic amelioration? (shrink)

How do social actors get addressees to stop retreating to metadiscussions that derail ground-level discussions, and why do they expect the strategies to work? The question is of both theoretical and practical interest, especially with regard to ground-level discussions of systemic sexism and racism derailed by qualifying “not all men” and “not all white people” perform the sexist or racist actions that are the topic of discussion. I use a normative pragmatic approach to analyze two exemplary messages designed to halt (...) retreats to metadiscussions about using “not all men” and “not all white people” qualifiers in discussions of systemic sexism and racism. I find that social actors use strategies that may at first glance appear to be out of bounds in an ideal critical discussion—e.g., demanding, shouting, cussing, sarcasm, name-calling—to cultivate a context where using not-all qualifiers becomes increasingly costly. The strategies are designed to get addressees to recognize that using not-all qualifiers is not an epistemic correction of a hasty generalization or ethical intervention to halt promulgation of stereotypes about men and white people. Instead, the strategies display that using not-all qualifiers is a fallible sign of willful hermeneutical ignorance, willful ignorance, and an attempt to reassert a measure of social dominance. These findings affirm the need to investigate the various strategies and normative materials social actors actually bring to bear to regulate disagreement. (shrink)

Disabled people face obstacles to participation in epistemic communities that would be beneficial for making sense of our experiences and are susceptible to epistemic oppression. Knowledge and skills grounded in disabled people's experiences are treated as unintelligible within an ableist hermeneutic, specifically, the dominant conception of disability as lack. My discussion will focus on a few types of epistemic oppression—willful hermeneutical ignorance, epistemic exploitation, and epistemic imperialism—as they manifest in some bioethicists’ claims about and interactions with disabled (...) people. One of the problems with the epistemic phenomena with which I am concerned is that they direct our skepticism regarding claims and justifications in the wrong direction. When we ought to be asking dominantly situated epistemic agents to justify their knowledge claims, our attention is instead directed toward skepticism regarding the accounts of marginally situated agents who are actually in a better position to know. I conclude by discussing disabled knowers’ responses to epistemic oppression, including articulating the epistemic harm they have undergone as well as ways of creating resistant ways of knowing. (shrink)

In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the (...) complainants misrecognize themselves in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity.Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians”can do their part in bringing about a just society. (shrink)

In the midst of the De pace fidei’s imagined heavenly conference on the theme of the possibility of religious harmony, Nicholas of Cusa has Saint Peter acknowledge to the Persian interlocutor that it will be difficult to bring Jews to the acceptance of Christ’s divine nature because they refuse to accept the implicit meaning of their own history of revelation. What is peculiar about this line in the dialogue is not merely that it flies in the face of what Cusanus (...) scholars tend to regard as an ecumenical spirit in Nicholas’ call to interreligious dialogue and mutual toleration. Rather, the statement reveals a peculiar hermeneutic principle at work in Nicholas’ understanding of the tension between truth and doctrine and the way that this tension informs human practice. Accordingly, by grappling with Nicholas’ portrayal of an imagined failure of Jews to practice interpretation correctly, I hope to shed light on Nicholas’ philosophy of religion in a way that neither ignores his anti-Judaism nor reduces the significance of his views to one of its most unpleasant manifestations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization by Ralph MartinR. Jared StaudtWill Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization. By Ralph Martin. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012. Pp. 332. $24.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-6887-9.The proper interpretation of the Second Vatican Council remains a pressing topic fifty years after the Council’s completion. Pope (...) Benedict XVI made it a hallmark of his pontificate to insist upon a hermeneutic of continuity in interpreting the council in relation to the past, opposing this view to one of discontinuity and rupture (see his “Christmas Address to the Roman Curia,” Dec. 22, 2005). Viewing the council in terms of rupture and correspondingly as an opportunity for disruptive innovation has been described by many as the “Spirit of the Council.” Recently, the conflict of these rival hermeneutics has resurfaced in vehement fashion in relation to proposals for innovation in pastoral practice and even in doctrine regarding marriage and sexuality.Ensuring a proper interpretation of the council requires not only a deep and thorough examination of texts themselves of the council, but also a careful placing of the texts within the Catholic tradition. In this endeavor, [End Page 147] Ralph Martin’s Will Many Be Saved? provides a needed analysis of the council’s teaching concerning salvation and its pastoral implications. In particular, Martin focuses on the meaning, historical and scriptural sources, and theological interpretation of Lumen Gentium (LG) §16. In doing so, he touches on a number of key issues relating to the legacy of Vatican II, most importantly the decline of the missions and evangelization in general. Martin argues that abandoning the proclamation of sin and the possibility of hell in favor of the universality of salvation has led to a serious crisis of evangelization.The first chapter, “Vatican II and the Priority of Evangelization,” places the theme of evangelization at the center of the council’s message. Pope Paul VI declared in Evangelii nuntiandi that the very purpose of the council was to make the Church more fit for the evangelization of the modern world. The topic of evangelization was taken up by Pope John Paul II in his own call for a New Evangelization. Although the New Evangelization focuses on restoring faith in the context of post-Christian cultures, John Paul also sought to reinvigorate the foreign missions, as seen in his encyclical Redemptoris missio. Martin contrasts this emphasis on evangelization with its diminishment in practice due to “a lack of conviction that being a Christian is really necessary in order to be saved. If it is not really necessary... why bother to evangelize?” (5). Although Martin recognizes that the Church teaches the possibility of salvation outside of the visible bounds of the Church, he also posits that “doctrinal ignorance or confusion about what the Church is actually teaching about the possibility of salvation” creates “one obstacle... to evangelization” (6). To respond to this confusion, he turns specifically to LG §16 to clarify the Church’s teaching.The second chapter provides Martin’s initial observations on this central text. Martin divides the text into three sections. The first, 16a, enunciates that those who have not received the gospel are still related to the people of God in various ways, mentioning Jews and Muslims explicitly, and affirms God’s universal will for salvation in 1 Tim 2:4. 16b deals with the possibility of salvation for those ignorant of the gospel, who live rightly in accord with conscience. 16c offers a sobering note, stating that “very often” the deception of the evil one and sin lead to “ultimate despair” and ending with the need to evangelize in order “to procure... salvation.” Martin notes that LG §16 was not controversial during the conciliar debates, though it did raise some concern from missionary bishops, who insisted on a strong reinforcement of the need for evangelization. Though LG only speaks of the possibility of salvation, Martin recognizes a leap from possibility to “probability or even certainty” in the later interpretation of the council (17, italics original), and he cites... (shrink)

Standpoint epistemology is committed to a cluster of views that pays special attention to the role of social identity in knowledge‐acquisition. Of particular interest here is the situated knowledge thesis. This thesis holds that for certain propositions p, whether an epistemic agent is in a position to know that p depends on some nonepistemic facts related to the epistemic agent's social identity. In this article, I examine two possible ways to interpret this thesis. My first goal here is to clarify (...) existing interpretations of this thesis that appear in the literature but that are undeveloped and often mistakenly conflated. In so doing, I aim to make clear the different versions of standpoint epistemology that one might accept and defend.This project is of significance, I argue, because standpoint epistemology provides helpful tools for understanding a phenomenon of recent interest: epistemic oppression. My second goal is to provide an analysis that makes clear how each of the readings I put forth can be used to illuminate forms of epistemic oppression. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Can The Psychopathologized Speak?Notes on Social Objectivity and Psychiatric ScienceAwais Aftab*, MD (bio)In "Exclusion of Psychopathologized Standpoints Due to Hermeneutical Ignorance Undermines Psychiatric Objectivity" (2022), Bennett Knox offers a compelling argument that failure of psychiatric community to engage with the "psychopathologized" in processes such as the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) constitutes a form of epistemic injustice and threatens the social (...) objectivity of psychiatric science. I find myself in agreement with the central thesis and I am glad to see it articulated so well by Knox. While it is clear that the exclusion of psychopathologized standpoints in psychiatric science cannot be justified, there are issues that arise that require further clarification, and may generate disagreements, when we consider the complexities of how this inclusion is to take place, what requirements can be imposed on this process of inclusion, and the relationship between the DSM and psychiatric science broadly when it comes to social objectivity.The Methodological Objectivity of the DSM Does Not Exhaust the Methodological Objectivity of Psychiatric ScienceThe DSM is a nosological project within a particular historical context, operating with a certain set of assumptions (Aftab & Ryznar, 2021). The DSM has limitations in terms of what sorts of perspectives it can meaningfully incorporate, but the limitations of the DSM are not the limitations of psychiatric science. This is because psychiatric science is a pluralistic domain and includes many different methodologies and perspectives (Jerotic & Aftab, 2021). As one example, the DSM is poorly equipped to capture the phenomenology of psychiatric conditions. It is not something that it sets out to do. This, however, only becomes a serious problem if we adopt the attitude "if it's not in the DSM then it doesn't really count." Unfortunately, many in the psychiatric community have [End Page 267] adopted this sort of attitude, at least implicitly, resulting in a serious neglect of phenomenology (and various other perspectives, including those of the psychopathologized), leading Nancy Andreasen to bemoan the "death of phenomenology." (Andreasen, 2007) The DSM is methodologically limited by design; there are things that it will fail to do. The appropriate response is to acknowledge these inherent limitations. Other perspectives such as neurodiversity or Hearing Voices Movement also bring their own sets of assumptions and limitations. The DSM is simply one element, one perspective, one methodology in a scientific field that is capable of and ought to adopt a plurality of perspectives and methodologies. This is worth pointing out because Knox appears to assume that if it proves difficult or impossible for the DSM to include radically diverse perspectives, then "all the worse for psychiatry's objectivity." If it is impossible for the DSM, that does not mean that it is also impossible for psychiatric science.1In Determining What Counts as Inappropriate Exclusion, What Is the Role of Scientific Expertise?Longino herself brings up this question: "in determining what counts as inappropriate exclusion of dissenting perspectives, does it matter what kind of issue is involved? Are the duties of inclusion different when the question is, Should we be trying to learn about such and such, for example, atomic fission? than when it is, Is atomic fission a controllable or uncontrollable process?" (Longino, 2002, p. 133) The danger that needs to be averted here is that of trivializing expertise and placing experts on an equal footing with non-experts, a danger that is strikingly illustrated by our social response to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.Take an example from medicine. Individuals with lung cancer have a lot to offer when it comes to the treatment of lung cancer, including their experiences of care, and choice of, say, aggressive chemotherapy vs palliative comfort care, etc. but how much do they have to contribute on the matter of the histopathological classification of lung cancer? Consider the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) (Kotov et al., 2021). This quantitative nosological project has a very specific aim: to determine the patterns of covariation among psychiatric symptoms using statistical techniques such as factor analysis. This... (shrink)

Abstract:This article brings together considerations from philosophical work on standpoint epistemology, feminist philosophy of science, and epistemic injustice to examine a particular problem facing contemporary psychiatry: the conflict between the conceptual resources of psychiatric medicine and alternative conceptualizations like those of the neurodiversity movement and psychiatric abolitionism. I argue that resistance to fully considering such alternative conceptualizations in processes such as the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders emerges in part from a particular form of epistemic (...) injustice (hermeneutical ignorance) leveled against a particular social group (which I call the "psychopathologized"). Further, insofar as the objectivity which psychiatry should aspire to is a kind of "social objectivity" which requires incorporation of various normative perspectives, this particular form of epistemic injustice threatens to undermine its scientific objectivity. Although many questions regarding implementation remain, this implies that psychiatry must grapple substantively with radical reconceptualizations of its domain if it is to achieve legitimate scientific objectivity. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the relevance of the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer for contemporary feminist scholarship on epistemic injustice and oppression. Specifically, I set out to argue for the Gadamerian notion of hermeneutical openness as an important hermeneutic virtue, and a potential remedy for existing epistemic injustices. In doing so I follow feminist philosophers such as Linda Martín Alcoff and Georgia Warnke that have adopted the insights of Gadamer for the purpose of social and feminist philosophy. Further, (...) this paper is positioned in relation to a recent book chapter by Cynthia Nielsen and David Utsler in which they argue for the complementarity, and intersecting themes and concerns of Gadamer's hermeneutics and Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic injustice. However, Nielsen and Utsler solely focus on Fricker's conception of epistemic injustice and the two forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, that she identifies. In this paper I expand their analysis by considering other forms of epistemic injustice such as wilful hermeneutical ignorance and contributory injustice. Thus, this paper contributes to the budding literature on the relevance of Gadamer's work for the debates pertaining to epistemic injustice and oppression by expanding such analysis to other forms of epistemic injustice, and by further arguing for the strength of Gadamer's work in terms of offering relevant insights for the reduction and remedy of existing epistemic injustices. (shrink)

“The will to truth,” says Nietzsche, “is merely a form of the will to illusion”; it’s not the opposite of “the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue,” but instead “its refinement.” What can this mean? How could a quest for knowledge ever serve a desire to remain in the dark? I answer this question by means of an example in Proust, whose protagonist expends huge quantities of energy apparently trying to find out whether his love partner (...) is faithful. The efforts, it turns out, are designed not to yield any concrete information but only to give him the impression that he’s left no stone unturned. So they serve what we might call a second-order will to ignorance: a drive to remain unaware of just how much we don’t know. This, too, is what Nietzsche’s “Wissenschaftler” are up to—and maybe, in some contexts, it’s what we should all be up to. (shrink)

Too often associated with suspicion rather than trust, Ricœur's hermeneutics is understood by many primarily as a critical endeavor. In this way, the fragile balance that he is trying to maintain between the two approaches is ignored. The objective of the following study is, by means of Ricoeur's "dialectical game of suspicion and trust", to elucidate the complexity of his hermeneutics and to demonstrate that trust is as pivotal as suspicion. At the difference of some authors who maintain that trust (...) and suspicion are opposed, even mutually exclusive approaches of two kinds of hermeneutics, it will be shown that Ricoeur has developed a single hermeneutics which encompasses both approaches and explores them on different levels (epistemological, anthropological, ethical, sociopolitical). In the limited number of contributions dedicated to Ricoeur's concept of trust, these different levels are frequently conflated, whereby the relationship between religious belief and trust/mistrust is completely ignored. Consequently, the divergent perspectives of his early and late philosophical work, as well as certain discontinuities, are overlooked. Therefore, this study places a central emphasis on the neglected religious level of suspicion and trust. (shrink)

Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This paper examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Fricker’s (2007) discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration. Fricker’s work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural oppression plays in producing interpretive harm, ii) the use of single-axis conceptual resources (...) to understand intersectional oppression, and iii) the failure to recognize the legacy of women of color’s epistemic resistance work surrounding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I argue that Fricker’s whitewashed discussion of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the United States is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers and exemplifies the strategic forgetting that is a central methodological tactic of white feminism. (shrink)

This chapter explores how what is dismissed as “trans activism” is often public philosophy. It considers how so‐called “public philosophy” on trans issues often does a substantially worse job of living up to the name. The chapter discusses how the dichotomy between “trans activism” and “public philosophy” provides a pretext for marginalizing trans voices. To draw on Black feminist philosophical thought, lived experience is a criterion for knowledge of the needs of marginalized people. Like other marginalized communities, trans communities have (...) encountered many areas in which hermeneutical liberation is needed. Public philosophy as trans activism is often systemically and systematically ignored or willfully misinterpreted as being biased and motivated by self‐interest, whereas anti‐trans (public) philosophy is seen as asking the important questions. (shrink)

For both Gadamer’s project of a philosophical hermeneutics as for Heidegger’s early understanding of facticity (Faktizität) as practical knowledge, the problem of application is central and is always linked to the specific conditions under which an individual decides to act within a community. Both also agree on the fact that the sciences of man do involve more than the epistemic subject, this is why the context i.e. the phenomenological concept of ‘world’ becomes part of the understanding process, one that cannot (...) be ignored or transformed into an abstract matter. Understanding is therefore also in a specific way ‘historical’, as the application is dictated by momentary circumstances in life situations, which come before any use of theoretical knowledge and thus do not represent an appendix to theory. While Gadamer continuously insisted on the idea of a practical knowledge (Wissen) that surpasses the separations between theory and praxis, sophia and phronesis, Heidegger radicalized the idea of active thinking as an experience of language in connection to an essential ‘perception’ of Being itself, that goes beyond any subjectivity. The term by which he often characterizes this essential thinking (wesentliches Denken) is Vernehmen: a kind of receptive thinking. This conception of receptive thinking, as some conversations around the Zollikon Seminars and Le Thor/Zähringen will briefly show, lead Heidegger also to some interesting considerations on the human body. (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)

Two recent works will be considered that discuss Heidegger and Nietzsche in the context of the problem of overcoming metaphysics and the onto-theological tradition. A common criticism will be that these works in their attempt to retrieve a conception of religion, politics or faith beyond onto-theology and metaphysics tend to justify or idealize particular historically and culturally conditioned perspectives, which are not immune from further philosophical critique. Simon Oliai’s approach to countering the burgeoning fundamentalisms in our global age is ultimately (...) not very convincing, representing as it does, a Western, liberal, Eurocentric worldview. The author’s use of Nietzsche or Heidegger for this purpose is also not very compelling. The remainder of this review essay appraises the volume edited by Cimino and van der Heiden, which attempts to rethink faith beyond onto-theology in several interesting ways. Although meant to be a comparative study, several contributions subscribe to a general Heideggerian (or Heidegger-inspired phenomenological-hermeneutical) theoretical framework, which itself is not rigorously scrutinized. A problematic implication is that Nietzsche’s own critical and constructive views of philosophy, his critique of religion and history, and his positive appraisal of faith and divinity are not seriously considered on their own terms: they are either mostly ignored, or they are selectively interpreted through a Heideggerian lens, with the result that this volume puts forward a mostly unfavorable view of Nietzsche. Some of the conceptual moves credited to Heidegger in the volume have their equivalents in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which a comparative and evaluative study such as this one must seriously take into account by resisting the uncritical acceptance of Heidegger’s own view of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy avoids the problem of literary objectiveness altogether. His approach witnesses the general fact that an indifference towards literary objectiveness in particular, leads to a peculiar neglect of par excellence literariness as such. It seems obvious, however, that the constitutive aspects of the crisis of literary objectiveness cannot be shown to contain the underlying intention of bringing about this situation. At this point, one can identify what could probably be the most important element in a definition of literary (...) objectiveness. In contrast to ‘natural’ objectiveness and objectiveness based on various societal conventions, the legitimacy of a literary work is solely guaranteed by its elements being organized in accordance with the rules of literary objectiveness. Thus when the crisis of literary objectiveness intensifies, literariness will also find itself in a crisis. This crisis detaches new, quasi-literary formations from various definitions of literariness. When literary objectiveness ceases, however, to be understood as a system constituted by various objective formations aiming to correspond in one way or another to the ‘world’, scientific analysis of literary objectiveness will be rendered impossible. The crisis of literary objectiveness thus brings about the crisis of the theory of literature and the philosophy of art. Gadamer explicitly argues that the scientific approach proves to be inadequate in the analysis of artistic experience. This attitude results in the categorical rejection of a scientific orientation, but he seems to overemphasize an otherwise correct thesis on the non-reflexive character of artistic experience. It is the anti-mimetic and Platonic character of Gadamer’s aesthetic hermeneutics that determines the status of literary objectiveness in his system of thought. What is of crucial importance, however, is to point out that this aesthetics entails a fundamental reduction of the significance of literary objectiveness. As soon as the essence of aesthetic object-constitution is taken to be re-cognition, the absolutely natural interest in the original object represented by a work of art.Undoubtedly, Gadamer’s conception answers a number of questions that tend to be ignored by other theories. It is just as obvious, however, that Gadamer completes here the aesthetic devaluation of the objective domain. It is not the characteristics of the ‘original’ that constitute the image, but in effect the image turns the original into an original. Paraphrasing this claim one arrives at a near paradox: not objectiveness makes a work of art possible, but a work of art lends objects their objectiveness. (shrink)

There is a continuing irresolution on the levels, both of theory and political praxis, vis-à-vis a coming to terms with the problem of 'historical greatness'. This results from the pre-history of a concept which is, when seen in the context of a systematic theory of science, in two respects methodologically unsatisfactory. 1. The pre-idealist understanding of "greatness", in the sense of canonical exemplariness, is based on a timeless concept of morality, itself determined through a heteronomous concept of norm-giving transcendence and/or (...) nature. 2. The philosophy of history ignores the Kantian reference to the autonomy of the genesis of human orientation; instead it sees this genesis not as the expression of a potentially autonomous normativity but as a source of normative existential orientation. In this orientation the goal and the steps towards the goal are pre-reflexively implied. In the philosophy of history the 'historically great' function as genial mediators between telos and epoché. Their actions are not explicable by the categories of normal rationality. The lack of a sufficient methodology of socially practicable communication continues to lessen the chances of overcoming the practical and theoretical dependency on the idea of the mediating genius. Yet the shift to a critical social hermeneutic remains impossible as long as hermeneutic theory is willing to deny itself in the face of a purely scientistic analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Willful ignorance is an important concept in criminal law and jurisprudence, though it has not received much discussion in philosophy. When it is mentioned, however, it is regularly assumed to be a kind of self-deception. In this article I will argue that self-deception and willful ignorance are distinct psychological kinds. First, some examples of willful ignorance are presented and discussed, and an analysis of the phenomenon is developed. Then it is shown that current theories (...) of self-deception give no support to the idea that willful ignorance is a kind of self-deception. Afterwards an independent argument is adduced for excluding willful ignorance from this category. The crucial differences between the two phenomena are explored, as are the reasons why they are so easily conflated. (shrink)

Though everyday life accords a great deal of significance to practical abilities—such as the ability to walk, to speak French, to play the piano—philosophers of action pay surprisingly little attention to them. By contrast, abilities are discussed in various other philosophical projects. From these discussions, a partial theory of abilities emerges. If the partial theory—which is at best adequate only to a few examples of practical abilities—were correct, then philosophers of action would be right to ignore practical abilities, because they (...) could play no fundamental role in an account of human agency. For the idea that practical abilities *do* play a fundamental role in human agency to be worth considering, an alternative conception of them is needed. As a first step, I attempt some of the necessary ground-clearing work. (shrink)

It is a commonplace amongst communitarians, socialists and feminists alike that liberalism is to be rejected for its excessive ‘individualism’ or ‘atomism,’ for ignoring the manifest ways in which we are ‘embedded’ or ‘situated’ in various social roles and communal relationships. The effect of these theoretical flaws is that liberalism, in a misguided attempt to protect and promote the dignity and autonomy of the individual, has undermined the associations and communities which alone can nurture human flourishing.My plan is to examine (...) the resources available to liberalism to meet these objections. My primary concern is with what liberals can say in response, not with what particular liberals actually have said in the past. Still, as a way of acknowledging intellectual debts, if nothing else, I hope to show how my arguments are related to the political morality of modem liberals from J.S. Mill through to Rawls and Dworkin. The term ‘liberal’ has been applied to many different theories in many different fields, but I’m using it in this fairly restricted sense. First, I’m dealing with a political morality, a set of moral arguments about the justification of political action and political institutions. Second, my concern is with this modem liberalism, not seventeenth-century liberalism, and I want to leave entirely open what the relationship is between the two. It might be that the developments initiated by the ‘new liberals’ are really an abandonment of what was definitive of classical liberalism. G.A. Cohen, for example, says that since they rejected the principle of ‘self-ownership’ which was definitive of classical liberalism, these new liberals should instead be called ‘social democrats.’My concern is to defend their political morality, whatever the proper label. (shrink)

This study elicits a concern to show forth those elements in the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas that can menaingfully engage with those trends in contemporary hermeneutical philosophy and theology that highlight the conditioned nature of human understanding. The main point of reference in this regard os the hermeneutical philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. At the heart of this hermeneutical enterprise is Thomas's construal of the relationship between intellect and will, a relationship that can be described as one (...) of dynamic reciprocity. A dynamic interaction between intellect and will obtains in both their natural and graced operations. Hence, the title of this book, The Hermeneutics of Knowing and Willing in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Some might be concerned that the notion of hermeneutics will import the spectre of relativism into Thomas's thought. By guiding the reader through Thomas's doctrine of man as made to the image of the Trinity, his Trinitarian theology, his Christology, and his treatment of grace, the theological virtues of faith and charity, and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, the author shows how Thomas in fact offers us resources for a theological hermeneutics of objectivity. The criteria for this objectivity, so the author argues, are Trinitarian, Christological, Pneumatological, ecclesial, and Scriptural. It is to be hoped that this book will be read not only by those who have a particular interest in Thomas's theology but also by theologians outside of the Thomistic tradition, particularly those interested in hermeneutics. (shrink)

Social justice demands that we attend carefully to the epistemic terrains we inhabit as well as to the epistemic resources we summon to make our lived experiences tangible to one another. Not all epistemic terrains are hospitable—colonial projects landscaped a good portion of our epistemic terrain long before present generations moved across it. There is no shared epistemicterra firma,no level epistemic common ground where knowers share credibility and where a diversity of hermeneutical resources play together happily. Knowers engage one (...) another on a politically saturated,unlevel knowing fieldwhere members of dominant groups work to forcibly maintain their epistemic home-terrain advantage. I use the metaphor of the unlevel knowing field to capture these oppressive epistemic structures. The unlevel knowing field is a hungry place where all knowledge that fails to nurture and sustain dominant ways knowing risks being dragged onto the dominator's epistemic home turf to be mined, coopted, consumed, or destroyed. Knowledge and willful ignorance circulate with equal vigor in this hungry world. From the standpoint of oppressed/resisting peoples, the unlevel knowing field is a minefield, an epistemic twilight zone, which must be traversed with considerable care and endless attention. The harms epistemic injustice produces are not disembodied harms. Repeated acts of injustice weather our bodies, dull our minds, weaken our hearts, and traumatize the spirit of our communities. They create public-health precarities and invite mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual illness into our being. Epistemic oppression is a cruel thief. It is disorienting, exhausting, and deadly. It triggers anger, anxiety, depression, and resistance. It steals our time, energy, and attention away from more beautiful things. (shrink)

Michelle Moody-Adams suggests that “the main obstacle to moral progress in social practices is the tendency to widespread affected ignorance of what can and should already be known.” This explanation is promising, though to understand it we need to know what willful (affected, motivated, strategic) ignorance actually is. This paper presents a novel analysis of this concept, which builds upon Moody-Adams (1994) and is contrasted with a recent account by Lynch (2016).

Background: The foundation of all nursing practice is respect for human rights, ethical value and human dignity. In perioperative practice, challenging situations appear quickly and operating theatre nurses must be able to make different ethical judgements. Sometimes they must choose against their own professional principles, and this creates ethical conflicts in themselves. Objectives: This study describes operating theatre nurses’ experiences of ethical value conflicts in perioperative practice. Research design: Qualitative design, narratives from 15 operating theatre nurses and hermeneutic text interpretation. (...) Ethical consideration: The study followed ethical principles in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration and approval was granted by the local university ethics committee. Findings: The result showed that value conflicts arose in perioperative practice when operating theatre nurses were prevented from being present in the perioperative nursing process, because of current habits in perioperative practice. The patient’s care became uncaring when health professionals did not see and listen to each other and when collaboration in the surgical team was not available for the patient’s best. This occurred when operating theatre nurses’ competence was not taken seriously and was ignored in patient care. Conclusion: Value conflicts arose when operating theatre nurses experienced that continuity of patient care was lacking. They experienced compassion with the patient but still had the will and ability to be there and take responsibility for the patient. This led to feelings of despair, powerlessness and of having a bad conscience which could lead to dissatisfaction, and even resignations. (shrink)

Chapter 1: An Introduction: The ‘Semantic Sting’ Argument Describes Dworkin’s theory as concerning the conditions of legal validity. “A legal system is a system of norms. Validity is a logical property of norms in a way akin to that in which truth is a logical property of propositions. A statement about the law is true if and only if the norm it purports to describe is a valid legal norm…It follows that there must be certain conditions which render certain norms, (...) but not others, legally valid. Hence it also follows that there can be two types of disagreement over the truth or falsehood of propositions about the law. People can disagree over the question ‘What are the conditions of legal validity?’, in which case their disagreement is a theoretical one. Or they can agree on the conditions of validity, and disagree as to whether or not those conditions actually obtain in a given case or not.” Argues that the best way to interpret Dworkin’s ‘semantic-sting argument’ is as a general argument against conventionalism in legal positivism. Summarizes the outcome of Dworkin’s argument as follows: “[I]f Dworkin is right about the legal reasoning of lawyers and judges, conventionalism would be self-defeating: if lawyers and judges recognize as legally binding not only those norms which are uncontroversially identifiable under the Rule of Recognition, that is, if what they recognize as binding is not only source-based law, then conventionalism turns out to be false on its own terms. In other words, either law is not what lawyers and judges think that it is, in which case law is not a matter of conventions, or – if it is what lawyers and judges think – conventionalism is false, as they do not see the law as purely a matter of conventions.” Dworkin’s theory, then, is a new conception of jurisprudence aiming to present itself as a rival to conventionalism. The book will be concerned with re-examining positivism in light of the interpretative challenge. Chapter 2: Meaning and Interpretation “[R]oughly, interpretation can be defined as an understanding or explanation of the meaning of an object.” Interpretation in this narrow sense is distinct from a less formal and broader use of interpretation that makes it equivalent to explanation. “Hence also, only those objects which are capable of bearing some meaning qualify as objects of interpretation.” [Why shouldn’t we think of interpretation as object-identification? This seems to be closer to what Dworkin has in mind.] Thus, a consideration of the philosophical work on meaning is appropriate. First, a consideration of Davidson on interpretation. The thesis is that Davidson’s “radical interpretation” can only account for sentence meaning and not for linguistic interpretation in general. Davidson cannot account for the non-rule-governed aspects of communication. “Semantics, as opposed to interpretation, concerns those aspects of communication which are rule or convention governed…but such rules are normally unavailable as reasons or justifications for an interpretation. On the contrary, interpretation is usually required because the issue is not determined by rules or conventions.” Interpretation, rather, is parasitic with understanding the meaning of an expression and not equivalent with it. As Dummett notes, any reflection on the meanings of words assumes prior knowledge of ordinary meanings. “This leads to the conclusion that understanding or explaining the meaning of an expression and interpreting it, are two conceptually separate things. It also indicates that seman ics can only be employed, if at all, to elucidate the concept of interpretation by way of contrast: interpretation concerns those aspects of communication which are under-determined by semantic rules or conventions.” Pragmatics, the study of problems posed by discrepancies between utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning, would seem to be closer to inquiry into interpretation. Both are concerned with understanding how meaning is possible where conventional rules leave off. Contemporary pragmatics, moreover, recognizes the logically indeterminate character of communicative inferences beyond conventional meaning and that the contextual conditions that account for the possibility cannot be realized in the semantic structure of the sentence. However, different criteria of success may be at work in pragmatics than interpretation. Pragmatics is concerned with how communication is achieved and thus the criteria of success would be grasping a speaker’s intentions. Many think, however, that communication is unimportant in certain spheres of communication, e.g. artistic interpretation, and that in these cases the aim of interpretation is not to uncover the actual artist’s intentions. What kind of meaning is interpretation aimed at then? It cannot be the meaning the object has for the interpreter. “Interpretation purports to be a statement about the object interpreted, not about the subject who offers the interpretation…it is crucial to remember that not everything we say about a work of art, or any other text, amounts to an interpretation of it. Only those aspects of a text which can shed light on its meaning form part of the text’s interpretation. What the text means for someone rarely entails anything about what the text means.” [This is puzzling to some extent for it remains somewhat ambiguous what it means to talk of subject-independent meaning.] Interpretive meaning attribution is, rather, counterfactual. “In general, I will suggest that the answer to this question consists in the fact that meaning is assigned by a counterfactual statement. Given that x is the meaning attributed to, for instance a text T, and x is not the literal meaning of T, nor is it the meaning of T intended by its author, then the attribution of meaning x to T can only be understood as the contention that on the basis of certain assumptions a certain fictitious or stipulated speaker would have meant x by expressing T.” Thus, on this account, interpretation, when it does not concern an actual speaker, turns out to be a kind of counterfactual intention attribution. Twofold point: “First, that interpretation is essentially a matter of attributing intentions, that is, in the pragmatics sense of ‘meaning’, namely, meaning that such-and-such by an act or expression. At the same time, interpretations need not be based on the intentions of actual authors; the meaning of an act or expression is understandable in terms of counterfactual intentions.” [Are we really restricted to understanding the coherence and integrity of meaning in such a way? Presumably the author is a kind of device for organizing meaning, much like Dworkin’s integrity, but need it take that format?] The logic of interpretation is typically reducible to intention attribution. [What role does the counterfactual author play in structuring meaning?] The criteria of interpretive success will depend upon the object, whether it is the real author or the counterfactual author. If the former, success will depend upon the retrieval of the author’s actual intentions. “Likewise, if the author is characterized in terms of some ideal representative of a certain genre, for instance, the presumptions which are taken to determine this c aracterization would provide the criteria of success for the particular interpretation offered.” [The criteria of success would seem, then, to be the principles, ideals, etc. that we attribute to the counterfactual author. These attributed qualities would be doing all the work – is the attribution of intention to the hypothetical author, then, really necessary at all?] [Does this account presuppose a weird dichotomy between what an object is and what it means? This dichotomy is different, if present at all, in Dworkin.] Chapter 3: Dworkin’s Theory of Interpretation and the Nature of Jurisprudence Three main insights of Dworkin’s theory of interpretation: “First, that interpretation strives to present its object in its best possible light. Second, that interpretation is essentially genre-dependent. And third, that there are certain constraints that determine the limits of possible interpretations of a given object.” Why the best light? Dworkin doesn’t really address this question in depth but claims that otherwise we are left with no way of justifying and choosing an interpretation or we are left with the author’s intention model, which we should reject. [Marmor doesn’t seem clear on what precisely it means to present something in its best light – seems to conflate it with most appealing light which, I take it, is different than what Dworkin has in mind.] “Dworkin is quite right to maintain that without having some views about the values inherent in the genre to which the text is taken to belong, no interpretation can take off the ground. The values we associate with the genre partly, but crucially, determine what would make sense to say about the text, what are the kinds of meaning we could ascribe to it.” There is no necessity for an interpretation to present an object in its best light with regards to the genre it is taken to be part of. Interpretations “could simply strive to present it in a certain light, perhaps better than some, worse than others, but in a way which highlights an aspect of the meaning of the text which may be worth paying attention to for some reason or another.” [What kind of reasons would count in choosing to present it in one light rather than another?] There is simply zero grounds for Dworkin’s assertion that we have no reason to pay attention to an interpretation that does not present it in its best light. Take a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet, for example – not the best light, but a legitimate one. [This seems related to the next criticism – clearly Dworkin would have to loosen his insistence on the best, though not to detriment.] Moreover, especially with regards to art, it doesn’t appear possible to make an all things considered judgment about the best interpretation given the incommensurability of different values that are taken to inhere in a given genre. [Dworkin can respond here that we may have different available interpretations that could be justified with respect to the relevant value. Moreover, a lack of common denominator does not prevent any comparison whatsoever.] Constructive interpretation concerns social practices constituted by norms – it imposes a purpose or value rendering intelligible the normative character of the practice. There is a separate aspect of constructive interpretation that maintains that elements of the practice are sensitive to the point of the practice. It is important to note that different social practices will institutionalize themselves in different ways – thus, different practices will establish varying conditions on how the practice can be altered. The position of the positivists is that evaluative judgments concerning what the law should be are insufficient for determining what the law is given the nature of law’s institutionalization.&nb p; [This would seem to reside on a certain conception of law, i.e. an interpretation about where the value of law lies.] “[T]his being one of the main points of dispute between Dworkin and his positivist opponents, Dworkin cannot at this initial state presume law to be sensitive to its value in the manner that other, non-institutional practices might be, without incurring the charge of having assumed the very point at issue.” The upshot for Dworkin is that any explanation of a social practice such as law requires the same kind of reasoning as participation in that practice. This will be called the hermeneutic thesis. We can try to reconstruct a justification for this view based on the necessity of shared background assumptions – but this will not do since Dworkin’s claim is stronger: it contends that participants’ and theorists’ must “adopt one and the same normative point of view.” [The sense of normative here is unclear. It is true, though, that shared background assumptions do not imply viewing the law as valuable in any particular way, or at least it does not imply this in any strong sense.] Dworkin makes two distinct points with the hermeneutic thesis: “First, that the explanation of a social practice, like law or the arts, is essentially interpretative, and as such, necessarily value laden. Second, that the interpretation of such social practices, which Dworkin calls ‘argumentative’, is unique in the sense that the practice itself is an evaluative enterprise, and that therefore the interpreter of such a practice must form an evaluative judgment of her own about those values which are inherent in the practice that she purports to interpret.” [As stated, the first thesis is terribly ambiguous – for Dworkin, it clear implies a commitment to constructive interpretation. For Marmor, who accepts it, it is totally unclear what commitment he intends to make. He seems to mean simply that we have criteria for success concerning what counts as a successful explanation.] Mamor denies the second thesis. “What Dworkin seems to ignore here is that there is a crucial difference between forming a view about the values which are manifest in a social practice, like law, and actually having evaluative judgments about them.” [The problem, however, it that it is a contentious matter what values are part of the law – a theorist’s account of what values are constitutive of a particular legal system must rely on the kind of arguments which participants rely on. Of course, a theorist might simply note a debate about values and attempt to remain agnostic, but this will fail to be a full theoretical account of what law is!] Dworkin’s thesis seems to depend exclusively on his account of constructive interpretation. [This seems exactly right.] Chapter 4: Coherence, Holism, and Interpretation: The Epistemic Foundation of Dworkin’s Legal Theory Begins with discussion of Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. Sums up dual criticism as follows: “[T]he assumption that intuitions are independently true and the converse one, that their truth depends on fitting a coherent scheme, both seem to yield paradoxical results.” Dworkin, in his article “The Original Position”, claims that Rawls cannot commit himself to ethical realism. “[T]he natural model presupposes some form of ethical realism, while the constructive model does not. One important difficulty arising from an attempt to apply the natural model to Rawls is, that under the natural model, any theory which dopes not account for an intuition, at least for one which is held firmly, cannot be wholly satisfactory, just as scientific theory which does not account for certain observational data it is supposed to cover, would not be satisfactory in a familiar way.” Rawls, rather, is committed to a constructivist view of morality. Moreover, the reason we value coherence epistemically in moral theory is that it itself is a value of political morality – fairness requires consistency and publicity in the application of moral standards. Marmor notes the following problem with such a view: “[I]f coherence is justified, as it is here, with reference to certain moral values, that is, a specific conception of fairness, then we face the following problem: the presupposed values of fairness must themselves be based upon intuitive convictions, in which case the question of their truth cannot be ignored. If they are taken to be true…we are driven back to the perplexities of the natural model.” Discusses, helpfully, the Fish/Dworkin debate. The upshot is that Dworkin’s interpretive model is best off if it commits itself to a Quineian holism. However, this undermines his distinction between internal and external skepticism since holism must deny that moral judgments constitute a closed system. [This analysis seems exactly right.] Endorses Simmonds view that Dworkin’s theory does not meet the requirements of complexity he identifies as necessary to avoid vicious circularity in interpretive judgments of fit and identity. Coherence is doing the work through and through and therefore the interpretive theory of law is circular. [Will require further investigation, though it is unclear how coherence is doing any work in the pre-interpretive stage. At this stage, the judgments, if interpretive, seem to be derived from different sources. In any case, using coherence as a value seems to be highly suspect.] Why doesn’t Dworkin just reject Fish’s assumptions: because of his jurisprudence. “If legal texts can have a meaning that is not entirely dependent on a process of interpretation, then it is at least sometimes the case that the law can simply be understood, and applied, without the mediation of interpretation. And if that is the case, then the argument from interpretation against legal positivism collapses. It is no longer the case that every conclusion about what the law is, depends on evaluative considerations about what it ought to be.” Chapter 5: Semantics, Realism, and Natural Law Assessment of Michael Moore’s legal realism and its implications. [The final criticisms of Moore are not decisive.] Chapter 6: Constructive Identification and Razian Authority A consideration of Dworkin’s denial that the communication model of interpretation is appropriate for legal interpretation. Marmor argues that intentions do play a crucial role in the identification of legal norms in a way that is incompatible with Dworkin’s “coherence thesis”. Marmor takes Dworkin to be committed to the constructive identification thesis: that the identification of something as part of the legal, artistic, etc. genre can be done sufficiently by evaluative considerations. “Here, one must maintain that evaluative considerations are sufficient to determine whether something is a legal norm or a work of art”. [Fit, however, constrains possible evaluative considerations – thus evaluative considerations are not sufficient in themselves.] “Now the crucial point here is this: if you maintain the possibility of constructive identification in art, you must assume that works of art can be identified as such on the basis of certain features they happen to possess, features which contain no reference to any particular intention to create a work of art…unless we take intentions into account, how can we discriminate between the concept of an aesthetic artifact and the con ept of a work of art?” [It is unclear, and I think false, that constructive interpretation of anything requires identifying something irrespective of an artificers intentions. Those intentions may be relevant, dependent upon the genre under which we are trying to classify the object. Nothing, seemingly, about constructive interpretation in general excludes this possibility.] Marmor’s point is that it turns out to be impossible to identify art as art without reference to an artist’s intentions – especially given the state of contemporary art. [It is notable that Marmor’s response to counterexample implicitly depends upon a fully developed theory of aesthetics. His cursory comments on the matter of identifying art seem insufficient to say the least.] The rest of the chapter considers the incompatibility of Raz’s account of authority with constructive interpretation. The incompatibilities mentioned do not move beyond what Raz identifies in his article “Authority, Law and Morality”, but a defense of this notion of authority is defended in several [inconclusive] respects. [Raz and Marmor want to separate identification from content. This is not clearly a defensible separation.] Chapter 7: No Easy Cases? Chapter defends notion that there is a distinction between easy and hard cases in the positivist sense. Takes a Hartian approach and ultimately defends the distinction by associating it Wittgenstein’s conception of rule following. The point is that one need to look the purpose of rule in order to understand what the rule requires. Chapter 8: Legislative Intent and the Authority of Law Examines the following doctrine concerning the role of legislative intent in adjudication: “[F]irst, it would hold that laws, at least in certain cases, are enacted with relatively specific intentions, and that this is a matter of fact which is discernible through an ordinary fact-finding procedure. Second, that in certain cases the presence of such a fact, namely, that the law was enacted with a certain intention, provides judges with a reason to decide the legal dispute in accordance with the relevant legislative intent.” [It is important that for Marmor, interpretive strategies are only appropriate in hard cases. However, we should wonder what grounds positivism can offer for deciding a hard case in any manner which is not the morally best manner according to the judgment of the judge. There are no legal grounds, by definition, in hard cases and so what justificatory strategy would endorse any judicial decision except for the morally best one?] We can ascribe intentions to a legislative body, when this is possible at all, by taking the shared intentions of the majority, rather than some group intention, to be the significant intentions. Moreover, we should expect a good deal of consensus about intentions for otherwise it is hard to explain how legislative bodies are able to produce so much legislation. Discussion of kinds of intentions concludes as follows: “I have distinguished between three main types of intention that are potentially relevant from the legal point of view. Apart from the intentions that are manifest in the language of the law itself, legislators typically have further intentions in enacting a given law, and sometimes they would have certain intentions bearing on its proper application. I have also suggested that some of these further intentions may be essentially non-avowable, in which case they are rendered initially irrelevant. Finally, I have pointed out that considerations of consistency require that the legislator’s application intentions be taken into account only if, and to the extent that, they are in accord with his further intentions.” The manner in which intentionalism is to be justif ed relies on the distinction, Marmor maintains, between expert and mere collective action authority. “The point I wanted to make is strictly conditional: if, and only if, a certain law is justified on the basis of the expertise branch of the normal justification thesis, would it make sense to defer to the legislature’s intentions in the interpretation of the law, that is, to the extent that there is, in fact,; such an intention and it can clarify something that needs clarification.” Insofar as a legislature can be considered an expert on the matter requiring adjudication and interpretation should the body’s intention be taken into account. Chapter 9: Constitutional Interpretation Begins by laying out general necessary features of a constitution. Then Marmor moves on to consider general questions of constitutional legitimacy. First, he considers what grounds might be offered for the legitimacy of a constitution at all. He notes that the central question is what permits a single generation to bind future generations. He then examines four arguments to avoid this problem. The first is based on the moral legitimacy of the constitution; Marmor rejects this solution for the [truly dubious] reason that the constitution would make no practical difference because it would not supply reasons in addition to those provided by morality [but, presumably, the point is that these legally valid rules would be institutionally enshrined]. The second is based on the moral authority of the framers and Marmor rightly rejects this on the basis of the idealization of the framers it requires and less rightly on the basis that there cannot be moral authorities. Third is the “argument from interpretation” which claims that “as long as the particular content of the constitution is determined by its interpretation, and the authoritative interpretation at any time correctly instantiates the values which ought to be upheld in the community, the constitution would be morally legitimate”. The fourth is Raz’s which argues that a constitution is valid so long as its constraints are morally permissible because conventions of this type might aid the continuity of the legal system, i.e. it is important to have a convention of this type and the constitution is a kind of this type. Marmor appears to endorse these two approaches and concludes: “The conditions for the legitimacy of a constitution must comprise the following conditions. First, the values and principles enshrined in it must be morally permissible…Second, when certain choices are made in particular cases, they would be legitimate if they are either morally underdetermined, or else, morally correct…It follows from this that both arguments must assume that at least in those areas in which the constitution would make a moral difference, it can be interpreted to make the difference that it should, that is, according to the true moral principles that should apply to the particular case...the moral legitimacy of constitutions very much dependent on the practices of their interpretation. In other words, a great deal of the burden of moral legitimacy is shifted by these arguments to the application of the constitution, thus assuming that the constitution is legitimate only if the courts are likely to apply the constitution in a morally desirable way.” [This implies that the only significant value constitutions have is in providing a conventional practice where some such practice is required.] Moves on to argue that courts typically rely, and rightly so, on moral considerations when deciding constitutional issues because typically, in cases of the kind that reach the supreme or constitutional court, there is no law on the case. Much of this relies on his earlier discussion about the nature of interpretation in the law – that legal interpretation is always a matter of cha ging the law. (shrink)

This study, based upon empirical phenomenological research, explores an essential phenomenon of human existence: the interpermeating communion of self and world. In interpermeation, the supposed separation of self and world is transcended. The being, energy, life, and meaning of the world "flow into" one's self and become integrated as part of who one is; simultaneously, one's being, consciousness, awareness, and self "flow into" the world and become part of the world. Conscious of interpermeation, we tend to understand ourselves and reality (...) differently, and to be more aware and compassionate with others and the natural world: awareness of interpermeation generates love as love generates awareness of interpermeation. A hermeneutic dialogue is offered between existential phenomenology, transpersonal psychology, and the world's spiritual traditions. (shrink)

This book examines and explores Jacques Lacan's controversial topologisation of psychoanalysis, and seeks to persuade the reader that this enterprise was necessary and important. In providing both an introduction to a fundamental component of Lacan's theories, as well as readings of texts that have been largely ignored, it provides a thorough critical interpretation of his work. Will Greenshields argues that Lacan achieved his most pedagogically clear and successful presentations of his most essential and notoriously complex concepts - such as structure, (...) the subject and the real - through the deployment of topology. The book will help readers to better understand Lacan, and also those concepts that have become prevalent in various intellectual discourses such as contemporary continental philosophy, politics and the study of ideology, and literary or cultural criticism. (shrink)

Readers expecting a history of nineteenth‐century pathology are in for a surprise. They will find instead a self‐conscious example of cultural studies, critical of some assumptions made in this field and of some feminist writing, but containing some alarming sentences like “My goal has been to give shape to the accidental palimpsests of an inveterately verbal, and increasingly visual, culture; to assemble a particular series of hermeneutic loose ends into a coherent account of how an extraordinarily bizarre system of signification (...) came into being” . With learned English like that, who needs Latin? But once we get into the main part of the book, things get much better. We are confronted with a study of the fringes of science, in popular writings, in literature, and in raree‐shows, one working from sources that the more austere scientifics of the Victorian period despised and that historians of science are prone to ignore. Metaphor and analogy are everywhere, and sensitive stomachs will be churned by vivid accounts of disease, deformity, and surgery.The first chapter is concerned with the cholera morbus, the plague of the nineteenth century, and with the way it could be perceived as an indicator of social ills. John Ruskin's word “illth” as an opposite of health is revived, and the terrible blackness of the shriveled and dehydrated victims of this disease imported from the East is linked with colonial and racist notions. The theme that a healthy body is like a well‐run state leads into the next chapter, on breast cancer. Surgery was not only agonizing but ineffective in the first half of the nineteenth century, but then the survival rate after three years rose gradually from 4.7 percent to 45 percent by 1900. O'Connor asks whether this saga, with cancer seen as cellular overproduction, reveals close connections with gender construction and the symbolic importance of breasts, concluding that it does not and that the language used really was neutral rather than sexual.She then looks at amputations and artificial limbs, seeing amputation as a threat to the whole masculine body that could be countered by prostheses almost undetectable to the observer. This allows reflection on illustration, where curiously disembodied hands are shown carrying out amputations; on dissembling and artificiality; on materialism; and on metaphors of wholeness and replacement and of extending senses and capacities. We see some extraordinary advertisements where men with artificial legs climb ladders and skate, perhaps on thin ice. The final chapter examines deformity, with monsters and freaks . P. T. Barnum is prominent here, but interesting links are also made to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace and its successors and the numerous museums that were such a feature of the Victorian period. They are strikingly placed in a continuum, rather than opposed, in a discussion of chaos and order, capitalism and health, deformity and degeneration. Wonder is presented as the key to modern sensibility, and there is a nice quotation on page 152: “If Beauty and the Beast should be brought into competition in London at the present day, Beauty would stand no chance against the Beast in the race for popularity.” Readers will have been led into a fascinating world at the periphery of the respectable science that most of us study and will rejoice in the extraordinary sights they see. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jack W. Meiland INTERPRETATION AS A COGNITIVE DISCIPLINE Interpretation is the fundamental method of the humanities. The humanist is concerned first to understand what a text, a speech, a work of art, means; and interpretation has this understanding as its goal. All of the other activities and aims of the humanist depend on interpretation. One cannot properly appreciate a work of art until one grasps what it means. Nor (...) can one appropriately evaluate it until this condition is met. Moreover, the importance of interpretation reaches far beyond the humanities into everyday life, where we interpret what we hear and read in order to grasp meanings. Its importance reaches into the sciences: the social sciences where one must interpret this individual behavior and that institutional practice, and the natural sciences where one must interpret the results of one's experiments. Because interpretation is of such fundamental and pervasive importance in our lives, it is urgent for us to understand what interpretation is and what it should aim at. In this article, I investigate the activity of interpretation by focusing on the interpretation of literary texts and by beginning with the views of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Eleven years ago, Hirsch published Validity in Interpretation, a book which delves into the nature of interpretation in great detail.1 Richard Palmer has said that Hirsch's book is "the first full-dress treatise in general hermeneutics written in English," and continues, "In the years to come, it will undoubtedly take its place among the significant American works on the theory of interpretation. In a systematic and carefully argued presentation, the book challenges some of the most cherished assumptions that have guided literary interpretation for some four decades."2 1 think that Palmer's prediction has been fulfilled. Hirsch's book remains a decade later one of the very few systematic American works in this field,3 and it has been widely read, much used in university courses, and has significantly influenced thought on its subject. Validity in Interpretation presents a carefully worked-out position buttressed by philosophically-informed 23 24Philosophy and Literature and systematic argumentation in a way which reveals the fundamental questions at issue. Although there have been scattered criticisms of Hirsch's views,4 in my opinion there has not so far appeared the kind of searching critique which this book deserves in view of its attempt to deal with these issues so seriously and at such a fundamental level and in view of the influence which the book has had. The necessity for a critique is now reinforced by the recent publication of another book by Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation, more than half of which is devoted to a further explication and defense of these same views.5 In undertaking to reply to Hirsch's position, I hope not only to cast doubt on that position but also, and mainly, to provide better foundations for the view which I hold. It is one of the great merits of Hirsch's work that it facilitates that constructive effort by attacking the issues at such a basic level, enabling us to come to grips with them immediately. In what follows, I will describe Hirsch's view, make clear what kind of position he holds, and defend his view against criticisms which I consider misguided. Then we will be in a position to assess his contentions and to defend an alternative theory. Hirsch's view is, briefly, that the interpretation of a literary work should aim at re-creating (or, as he sometimes puts it, "re-cognizing") the meaning which the author of that work intended the work to have. He opposes all views which ignore authorial meaning; views which hold that the meaning of a work may change through the ages, so that the work may have one meaning at one time and another meaning at another time; views which hold that the work may have meaning in virtue of its relation to the interpreter's interests, to the needs and problems of the interpreter's times or the spirit of his age, or in fact to anything except the author's intended meaning.6 The first point that must be... (shrink)

This article introduces the main conceptual and normative questions about willful ignorance. The first section asks what willful ignorance is, while the second section asks why—and how much—it merits moral or legal condemnation. My approach is to critically examine the criminal law's view of willful ignorance. Doing so not only reveals the range of positions one might take about the phenomenon but also sheds light on foundational questions about the nature of culpability and the (...) relation between law and morality. (shrink)

"The Marriage Translation" argues that a Benjaminian account of translation can shed new light on the ways in which contemporary practices of queer alliance transform, and are transformed by, legal and political discourse. In a constellation of readings—of arguments for the French pacs, of Benjamin's essays on translation, and on Goethe's Elective Affinities, as well as of two photos of the illegal weddings celebrated in San Francisco and in Bègles, France—the article emphasizes the ways social contexts are sometimes reinvigorated and (...) at other times ignored by the demand for certain forms of legal recognition. (shrink)

In analytic epistemology, the propositional ignorance of an agent is consistently defined in terms of an agent not having knowledge or true belief that something is the case. Recently, however, Piedrahita (2021) and Pritchard (2021) have argued that ignorance involves some kind of epistemic fault. Pritchard claims that ignorance is the product of an intellectual defect in the agent as an inquirer, whereas Piedrahita claims that ignorance involves an agent being in a certain kind of epistemically (...) suboptimal position. This article uses willful ignorance in Anglo-American criminal law as a lens through which to assess these claims. First, I argue that willful ignorance is a counterexample to Piedrahita’s view of ignorance. Second, I argue that Pritchard’s view of ignorance illuminates the epistemic culpability of willful ignorance, but the view faces challenging questions about the relationship between epistemic norms and epistemic values. (shrink)

This paper address the challenges that have emerged in the attempt to codify and enforce international standards of minority rights. Without offering any magic solutions for overcoming all of these difficulties, my aim is to more clearly identify the challenges they raise and the pitfalls ahead of us if we ignore them. These include conceptual confusions, moral dilemmas, unintended consequences, legal inconsistencies and political manipulation. The paper concludes with some ideas about how international minority rights might be institutionalized more successfully.

The increasing standardization, specialisation and monetarization of academic publishing is designed to foster quality in research and expression. But these tendencies also pose serious challenges to the expression of cultural difference, particularly with regard to philosophy and religious studies. Scholars from various cultural backgrounds outside of mainstream universities often find themselves marginalised when the quality of their work is judged through the metrics of mainstream academic publishing. Smaller journals which give a forum to local research are gradually disappearing or becoming (...) irrelevant. The corporate control of publishing limits the access and distribution of information making it difficult for smaller regional universities to access and conduct research. But these challenges to the expression of cultural difference also reflect the deeper tendencies of the information age. To approach this problem, we need to consider the conflict between culture and spirit on the one hand, with the flows of information and capital on the other. I will introduce this problem through an idea of hermeneutics presented by George McLean. I will then discuss the approaches to this problem by such writers as Michel Serres, Jean Francois Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. I will show that these latter writers devise strategies to reach something outside of the cybernetic flows of information in the media age, but that their solutions are incomplete because they rely on intellectual concepts of redemption and ignore the concrete practices of spiritual redemption. The issue that cross-cultural journals must consider is how to emphasize something beyond the merely intellectual; how to amplify practice within its expression. I will address this issue in the spirit of a poem by Emily Dickinson entitled “Publication – is the Auction” which supplies the title of this essay. (shrink)

An essay about hypochondria, past and present. Beginning with the observation that for centuries hypochondria has been blamed upon various forms of reading, I attempt to take seriously this venerable relationship between hypochondria and literature. By bracketing the medical and moral concerns that encumber most treatments of hypochondria, I instead seek to understand the condition as a method of reading, a close textual engagement that is at once anxious and oddly clear-sighted about its own limits, and which bears some similarities (...) to other, more familiar hermeneutic methods such as paranoid reading and ‘too-close reading’. In the second half of the essay, I draw upon the lives and writings of Maurice Blanchot and Franz Kafka, two writers who were themselves plagued by mysterious and unexplained symptoms, and attempt to show how the imperatives of literature as understood by each writer could meaningfully be described as hypochondriacal. Above all, then, this essay looks more closely at a figure whom it is difficult to take seriously, and asks whether, viewed from a certain angle, the hypochondriac might in fact be said to be endowed with a perspicuous if discomfiting form of insight. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"And They Sang A New Song":Reading John's Revelation From The Position Of The LambJ.A. Jackson (bio) and Allen H. Redmon (bio)Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and the seven seals." Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among (...) the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered.—Revelation 5:5–6In an interview with Markus Müller, René Girard asserts the importance of taking into account the apocalypticism of Christianity. Apocalypse, Girard reminds us, "means revelation: apocalypto means to open up and to show the truth. But it also means absolute violence, so the apocalypse is a violent revelation and a revelation of violence" (Girard 1996). That the Revelation is a violent revelation has been well established. Despite textual evidence that would beg those who approach the text to do just the opposite, readers have fixated on the violence of the Revelation since its inception, finding in it God's final retribution against those who persecute the Church.1 Commentators such as Dennis E. Johnson, William Hendricksen, and George Elden Ladd have produced recent, full-length commentaries that champion the appearance of a Christ in Revelation ready to establish himself as a military champion and exact his revenge on those who persecute him (see, for example, Johnson 2001; Hendricksen 1998; and Ladd 1993). These accounts, and those that follow suit, are blinded by the violent revelation of John's apocalyptic narrative and fail to see the poem's revelation of violence—the other, prophetic half of what Girard rightly contends exists in Christian apocalypse.This error is understandable to some extent. Read in its own light and apart from the Gospel revelation as understood by those familiar with mimetic [End Page 99] theory, one has no hermeneutical principle for recognizing the end to which John is writing. The victims of the text can be ignored in the precise way that all victims are disregarded when the scapegoat mechanism functions properly. Such should not be the case in the Revelation, though, a text in which the scapegoat mechanism is exposed and pushed to its logical conclusions. John offers his reader a glimpse into the way this mechanism will function when all that is left is wall-to-wall violence, when one is left with only two alternatives: succumb to the mechanism and reciprocate its violence, or extricate oneself through nonreciprocation (and potentially die).In the margins of the violent revelation in John's apocalyptic vision, a revelation of violence emerges that can expose humankind's potential to annihilate itself and the mechanism with which it will do so. When read through the lens of mimetic theory, one discovers that John's narrative delivers a revelation of violence, an explicit naming and unmasking of the sacrificial mechanism that can capture for the reader not only the machinations of the sacrificial apparatus but one's own potential participation in it as well. As such, the poem can posit itself as a commandment (a Thou-shall-not-murder) that ultimately refuses the temptation to respond to violence in violence.The fact that John uses the apocalyptic to present this directive should not be surprising. Girard writes: "Only through the mediation of the scapegoat mechanism can violence become its own remedy, and the victimage mechanism can only be triggered by the frenetic paroxysm of the 'crisis.' This means that the violence, having lost its vitality and bite, will paradoxically be more terrible than before its decline. As the whole of humanity makes the vain effort to reinstate its reconciliatory and sacrificial virtues, this violence will without doubt tend to multiply its victims, just as happened in the time of the prophets" (Girard 1978, 195–96). While Girard's commentary on biblical eschatology and apocalypse refers mainly to the scapegoat mechanism as it applies to and is revealed in the Gospel texts, we see the immediacy and the frenzy of the apocalyptic and the ubiquitous violent mimetic appropriations also performed in John's Revelation.2 John captures... (shrink)

The trend to centralization of the Mizrahi narrative has become an integral part of the nationalistic, ethnic, religious, and ideological-political dimensions of the emerging, complex Israeli identity. This trend includes several forms of opposition: strong opposition to "melting pot" policies and their ideological leaders; opposition to the view that ethnicity is a dimension of the tension and schisms that threaten Israeli society; and, direct repulsion of attempts to silence and to dismiss Mizrahim and so marginalize them hegemonically. The Mizrahi Democratic (...) Rainbow [The Keshet], the most prominent proponent and representative of this trend, was established in the 1990s with the intention of being a leading civic and political body in Israeli society. While it was the Mizrahi worldview that led to selection of the organization's name and aims, their vision was to be involved in social struggle on behalf of other groups in Israeli society. Since it was established, The Keshet has aimed to function as an assertive, long-term alternative coalition exerting influence, power, and pressure on the Israeli narrative network. And, indeed, the organization has succeeded in disrupting Israeli discourse, principally, by challenging the ideological foundations of the Zionist meta-narrative. Nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century and nearly a decade since it was established, The Keshet not only represents the most current wave of Mizrahi discourse, it has changed it to such a great degree that it is impossible to ignore its influence. Further, this alternative narrative may have significant potential to advance the internal Jewish discourse so fundamental at this time given the changing Israeli situation and regional conditions. And, while it is possible to view The Keshet and this new narrative as a continuation of the Mizrahi struggle, as a narrative The Keshet's agenda represents a post-colonial perspective and multi-cultural alternative to Zionism as a social vehicle. Amidst all of this, The Keshet continues to offer concrete proposals to change the Jewish character of the state as well as its internal and external relations. One of the primary goals of this study was to examine the rise of the Mizrahi narrative over the last two decades and the new Mizrahi discourse in Israeli society. More specifically, the study sought to attain an in-depth understanding of the central narrative created and represented by The Keshet. An additional goal was to investigate the influence of The Keshet's activity and the narrative it constructed in regard to other narratives. In particular, the study focused on The Keshet's opposition to the central Zionist narrative that infuses civic, political, and academic frameworks in Israel. Accordingly, the primary research questions investigated in the study sought to determine: What has been the influence of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow on the Mizrahi narrative in Israel? And, what are implications of such influence for the central Zionist narrative? Methodologically, the study was based on narrative and comparative analyses of texts from different periods of the older and newer Mizrahi narratives. The corpus included two types of texts: First, academic texts and opinion pieces, both philosophical and programmatic in nature, published in magazines, journals, books, as well as position papers; second, all of the texts published by prominent and influential figures who charted the path of The Keshet or led it organizationally and/or intellectually over the last twenty years (e. g., Yehudah Shenhav, Yossi Yona, Moshe Krief among others). All texts were examined by means of philosophical, historical and critical hermeneutic tools. This analysis revealed different levels of Mizrahi and civic discourse in Israel as well as among The Keshet's founders and leading ideologues. The study was based on a three stage process model, developed for purposes of this study, for investigation and analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative as well as other oppositional narratives, in particular opposition to the hegemonic meta-narrative. The stages are: issuing the challenge, dissolution and, liberation; that is, liberation is the measure of the ultimate success of the struggle for narrative change. Such change is not based on success in the field, but rather on a radical, fundamental reversal of thought, discourse patterns, stylistic structures, as well as forms of questioning - in this case of taken-for-granted racist mechanisms. However, the principal change is in achieving a deep, inner de-legitimization of the signifiers, categories, and reproductions of all manner of mockery that are based on immoral colonialist processes that are reinforced by regimes of fear and intimidation whose self-destruction began upon their very creation. This three stage model charts the course of the oppositional Mizrahi narrative from: accounting for the past (passing judgment on the so-called historic colonialist Zionism) to writing a new (pure Mizrahi) history and creation of a Mizrahi-Arab identity separate from the Ashkenazic, identified as Zionist. Contemporary post-colonialist discourse is integral in these stages. Such a perspective has been transformed by transitions from - binarism to hybridity, Orientalism to Occidentalism, the politics of "liberation" to "constructive" politics, from the history of consciousness to the history of change, as well as from nationalist to post-nationalist questions. Fundamentally, according to this approach, political and other struggles for the emerging narrative of Mizrahi (or Arab) history seek to centralize it in society and weave it amidst the models of multiculturalism. Undertaken in parallel, the central characteristics of all these stages are borrowed from countries in which the need for national reconciliation led to renunciation of apartheid and racist policies and historical judgment of the hegemony supported by racist leaders. In addition, these three moves were undertaken in Keshet and its ideologues by means of substantive symbolic violence directed at the hegemonic Ashkenazic discourse, which included creation of hatred of it, use of stereotypes the opposite of oppressive discourse, and adoption of an arrogant point of view toward it. This stands in stark contrast to the claims of the self-proclaimed new Mizrahi stance of a discourse established on purely ethical grounds that sought to cleanse itself of these very same oppressive elements. The model developed for and demonstrated in this study allows for analysis of oppositional narratives in which the libratory stage evolves into a form of entrapment, as appears to be occurring to the new Mizrahi discourse. This conclusion is based on the observations shared by many Keshet proponents including leading intellectuals who worked on the manifestos that were the subject of criticism from the Zionist camp. The study identified and defined the following six interwoven strata, which for purposes of explication are each discussed in a separate chapter: The first chapter presents a general theoretical discussion of the issue of the narrative and the inter-narrative struggle that has become central and applicable in various ways in the latest generation (e. g., anthropologically, hermeneutically, and philosophically). The analysis surveys different discussions in the inter-narrative struggle and locates them in the contexts, relations, and meanings derived from, representing, and indeed reproducing the narrative of national identity. The second chapter includes a historical survey of the older Mizrahi struggle that existed prior to the ascendance of the new Mizrahi narrative. Initially, Mizrahi discourse focused on expressing the ethnic protest that grew in years to follow. These feelings of discrimination and social distancing of the immigrants from Islamic countries gave birth to expressions of protest, the most prominent of which were Wadi Salib and the Black Panther Movement's various activities. The research literature contains many explanations for the exacerbation of the ethnic problem and creation of a situation that could not be ignored. The consensus academic view reached at the end of the 1970s identified a number of primary factors for this situation: the existence and extensive numbers of different ethnic groups; the relative or absolute segregation of frameworks within which members of these ethnic groups lived and acted; and the significant overlap between socio-economic status and feelings of discrimination retained by members of the Mizrahi group due years of neglect by the Ashkenazic establishment, the strengthening of Mizrahi social, cultural, and political power, as well as the emergence of a Mizrahi elite that identified with Mizrahi problems. The severe consequences of feelings of discrimination were expressed in a long series of events, such as: rioting by residents of the Rehovot Sharayim neighborhood in 1956; events of Wadi Salib in Haifa in 1959; and a chain of activities involving the Black Panthers in the 1970s. Protest was also an aspect of the "tent movement" in the 1970s and 1980s. Political activities were advanced by the Tami Movement that competed in the election for the 10th Knesset in 1981 and the Shas Movement that has continued to garner political power since being found in 1984. The 1980s and 1990s were characterized as the era of radical consciousness of Mizrahi discourse as well as by the rise to power, in consecutive order, of the political parties – Tami, Shas, and the Mizrahim HaHadashim [the New Mizrahi]. The latter party laid the foundations of the new radical Mizrahi discourse from which emerged such cultural activities as: Iton Aher [A Different Newspaper]; Bimat Kivon Aher [Another Direction Forum]; Efir'yon journal; the Halah Organization for Education in Neighborhoods, Development Towns, and Villages; Kedma; the newspaper – Patish [Hammer]; and, eventually the establishment of Keshet. The third chapter presents an examination of the materialization of the inter-narrative struggle in the case of Israel, with a specific focus on The Keshet and the new Mizrahi narrative advanced by it and intellectuals. The Keshet ideology is examined in the context of its grounding in post-colonial thought, especially that of Edward Said; the directions proposed by Ella Shohat and her followers; the central thinkers of the narrative in Israel in the last decade; and the harsh critique leveled at the Ashkenazic-Zionist narrative. The practical steps proposed for implementation within the multicultural model are also examined. Here the effort to reduce the centrality of Zionism while revealing its oppressive mechanisms was undertaken in parallel with use of these mechanisms in order to create a Mizrahi space with broad margins inclusive of alternative forms of Israeli identity in the Middle East and in conjunction with Arabs within and beyond Israel. Mizrahi traditionalism is examined in the fourth chapter in two particular respects. First, the criticism of the new Mizrahi narrative leveled by the renewed view and, second, the implications of the alternative in terms of creating a Mizrahi space that does not oppose Zionism. Rather, in opposing the post-colonialist perspective, this renewed traditionalist perspective criticizes as well as values Zionism. This space seeks to be both Jewish and Mizrahi. It does not detach itself from nationalist Zionism but rather views itself as a continuation of this tradition and, accordingly, is an effort to develop a next stage in its development. For example, an essential dimension of the traditionalist perspective, "commitment," is considered in this stage to be a fertile basis for dialogue with the past and as an anchor for contemporary interpretation of Mizrahi and other Jews' identities in Israel. The fifth and sixth chapters deal with all of the vectors of criticism directed at the new Mizrahi narrative, including its ideological foundations, philosophical stance, as well as intellectual and practical basis in the Israeli sphere in the face of Palestinian nationalism. These vectors of criticism from within and beyond The Keshet deal with issues, such as, the meaning of the movement's activities and the narrative that it offers regarding questions of Israeli identity, Israeli collective memory, and Mizrahi self-perception. At the same time, it must confront the capitalist neo-liberal narrative in a global world and thrive in a context in which it must make itself manifest amidst oppositional narratives. The final chapter presents a comprehensive, critical analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative. It does so by means of a theoretical model that examines it as an oppositional narrative – one that seeks to challenge the hegemonic meta-narrative, to dissolve the boundaries of the narrative discourse, and to propose liberation and redemption that may led to entrapment amidst a changing, a-dichotomous realities (e. g., global economic development in the face of Zionist nationalisms that display ideological strength as well as development of the sense of being an Israeli that maintains its vitality and continuity while being constituted by sectors that challenge being a Mizrahi, such as co-ethnic subjects. The Keshet's influence is dramatic and extends in a number of central directions. Its political activity and non-entry into the domains of the Israeli parliament granted the movement significant power in civic discourse and contributed to changing the persona of the Mizrahi discourse; for example, from political-party struggles over budgets and obtaining shares of the regime to changing the face of Israeli society and the centrality of the Mizrahi narrative. This change included deconstructing the Ashkenazic narrative and constructing comprehensive Ashkenazic-Zionist guilt, as evident in the Ehud Barak's request for collective forgiveness. This was accomplished through the participation of leading members of Keshet who appeared in prominent intellectual forums and engaged in lively discourse - principally in academic, social, and media domains. Such participation gave new meaning to various aspects of Israeli society while establishing different models of multiculturalism. The rise of the new Mizrahi narrative is a significant marker in the inter-narrative struggle as it represents a desire for separate or hybrid identities. And, the deep probing of the narrative constructed by leaders of The Keshet and those who identify with the movement produced a number of clear ways to distinguish it from the old Mizrahi struggle, whose history was portrayed through social protests, in a manner similar to linear vectors marked with wars and elections. The old Mizrahi struggle selected the traditional tactical struggle identified usually with social and political movements that seek to change political, social, and economic reality - from the bottom up. Their primary demand was to change decisions as well as the division of social goods and resources. Hence, this older period of struggle was not aimed at opposing the ideological foundations of the hegemonic narrative nor did it seek to undermine in a radical manner the unique nature of the state of Israel as a revolutionary solution for the problems of the Jews according to the Zionist approach, as a national home for the Jewish people, and recognition of the right to an preferred and meta-definition of Jewish nationalism. In contrast, the top down struggle advanced by the new narrative is part of an ideological movement led by the educated that is assertive and ground in post-colonialist theory. Accordingly, it was critical of the techniques and mechanisms of oppression as well as sought to attack the Zionist ideological foundations and to reveal its racist operations and the regimes that have preserved it so efficiently for many years. The uniqueness of this narrative is the intellectual offensive that continues to be advanced and, in parallel, development of the discourse struggle in Israel concerning the justification for Zionism and the concrete political proposal that Jews reject the taken-for-granted status of it as an ideology. This new narrative recognizes the historic difficulties of subversion as an emancipatory and, principally, moral effort. In addition, the new Mizrahi narrative shares the foundations and narrative of Palestinian victimization. In its radical version, the new Mizrahi narrative seeks to connect to the Palestinian narrative in order to create a new space here. According to this version, this action will take place gradually. The first stage will be characterized by opposition to Western European, Ashkenazic Zionism. The Eurocentric Zionism will surrender in the second stage, to be followed in the last stage by creation of a coalition of Jews and Arabs that will be establish through concrete actualization of the refugee status and victimization that is shared by both Palestinians and Mizrahim (whether as Mizrahim or Jewish-Arab). Not a speculative academic exercise, the goal sought by this narrative is delineate and to achieve a multicultural model in which equality, liberty, and social justice will overcome the nationalism and colonialism of either side; that is it will be neither Zionist nor Jewish. Thus, this approach stresses what is shared (e.g., acceptance of the Arab space and not a rejection of it; the legitimacy of the Arab language and culture). This is part of detachment from and historic judgment of the colonialist Zionist enterprise. This possibility includes moral elements that remove the evil and harm caused by Zionism for many years as well as inner cleansing – primarily among Ashkenazim – of attitudes towards Jews and non-Jews. Though, in this regard, it should be noted that, to date, the new narrative has not made similar claims that Palestinians undergo a similar process. The assumption seems to be that this should be tested, that the coalition proposed is a possibility that will be recognized by the Palestinians, and that they are prepared to undergo a similar, shared moral process that involves negating the state of Israel as a Jewish, Western state, a state of the Jewish people, and not only for those who live within it. These Mizrahi thinkers conducted a significant move through deconstruction and substitution of the Eurocentric narrative with a multi-cultural proposal that is optimistic and even attractively naïve. Today, they acknowledge that they did not take into account Palestinian nationalist violence directed to citizens, the traditionalist alternative, and widespread opposition within the Mizrahi community toward what is perceived to be Mizrahi seclusion. They also did not take into account the harsh criticism rendered by young and educated Mizrahim who claim that they were born into a complex, multi-dimensional, multi-layered identity that includes internalization of the language of the West and rules of the game of this complex identity. And, though they are critical of some of its values, this makes it difficult to mount internal emotional opposition to the West and to the globalization contained within this world. Hence, this more familiar world is preferred over the values of the Mizrahi-Arab alternative, particularly in regard to problems in the domains of democratic citizenship, stance taken toward women, and freedom of speech. Further, educated Mizrachim reject the post-colonialist perspective and are stridently critical of its dichotomization. They claim that such a division is irrelevant in a world in which older ideologies have collapsed and new spheres – such as cyberspace and others – are open to them in which they can present themselves with an Israeli identity that is not categorized as necessarily Mizrahi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental PilgrimageRoger CorlessThe Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage. By Norman J.Girardot. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002. xxx + 780 pp.Don't make the mistake I made and allow the size of this book intimidate you. I let it sit around for many months, fearing, as did the author, to "[row] out over the great ocean (...) of material" (pp. xix-xx), but once I had set sail I found myself in enjoyable, if sometimes irascible, company and I was unwilling to jump ship. Girardot is in full command of his ark of fascinating and diverse creatures, and his main argument is never lost in the details. His writing is lucid and the text is broken up into manageable blocks by subheadings with intriguing titles, rendering each segment ehipassiko, encouraging us to keep reading.A book of this importance and weight (about 1.5 kg) deserves a review article more than just a review, or, better, a discussion panel at a major academic conference. This journal is notorious for reviews of astonishing length, but I would like my review to be short enough that it will actually be read, so that it will entice you to read the book. I will not attempt a summary nor will I critically address all the issues that are brought up. Instead, I will try to show why I regard this book as an instant classic and even, I would say, a watershed in the meta-science of sinological and Religionswissenschaftlich self-reflection.We all know James Legge as the perpetrator of The Chinese Classics, the multivolume opus that, in the 1960 Hong Kong University Press revision, dominates the Chinese religion(s) section of our personal libraries. Since there is nothing like it, we consult it, but we pretend we do not, for, after all, it's out of date, surely, and Legge was an old fuddy-duddy—Scottish, a Protestant missionary, and, worst of all, a Victorian. Girardot seems to have had somewhat this opinion of Legge when he assayed a brief biography of him, but he discovered that his "Legge work" (as he calls it) opened the door to a pivotal era in academe and world culture. Once the door to the long-neglected cupboard had been opened, all kinds of fascinating objects came tumbling out. "Oh, so that's how it used to be, and that's why it's like this today!" No scholar of Chinese religion(s) can afford to ignore Girardot's extensive and insightful ruminations on the state of the field then and now.The point of the book is summed up on page 531: "[Legge] is an outstanding [End Page 276] example of the difficult nineteenth-century passage from religious discourse to what Edward Said calls the 'secular criticism' of the modern world." To study Legge is to study the origins of our discipline. He may have been a fuddy-duddy; he was certainly a workaholic, putting his Sassenach colleagues at Oxford to shame by sleeping little and rising in the middle of the night to persist in his hermeneutic labors. But he was also a student of the heathen land he went to convert, and he tried his best not only to see (the presumed universal) God in the ancient texts but also to find something noble in apparent atheists and agnostics such as Confucius. In his interaction with Max Mueller (and this book is as much about Mueller as it is about Legge) he both agreed and disagreed, in a complex choreography, with the comparative method underpinning The Sacred Books of the East. He was a Scotsman's Scotsman, a stag at bay, dourly standing his ground (as a Congregationalist, and therefore a nonconformist both north and south of the border) against, first, the London Missionary Society and, later, the prevailing academic and ecclesiastical climate at Oxford.No armchair orientalist, as were some of his colleagues across the Channel, he befriended native informants and studied the indigenous commentaries (mostly Qing) to which they referred him, so that his translations, although not as fluid as Waley... (shrink)

In the context of Christian evangelization, the dialogue between culture and the Gospel has always been a major challenge for the Church. In Africa, particularly in Mozambique, this challenge still persists, since the western colonization of Africa failed in the evaluation of existing cultures and in the respect for the African Traditional Religion. Hence the need of an encultured Christianity, rooted in these peoples cultural reality, despite the wearing and difficulties to understand this concept. Culture is a fundamental dimension, inherent (...) to the human being and characterizes all of its existence. Therefore, an evangelization that ignores it, together with the local religiosity and takes them for primitive, is a huge mistake. Thus, the present dissertation approaches the need for the Church in Africa - Mozambique of an effective inculturation of the faith. It founds its approach on a bibliographical review of authors who ponder the theme. The research, developed in three chapters, it will present, first, an outline of Africa's history, its cultural diversity and the Christian presence on the Continent and then will elaborate an understanding of the following concepts: culture, interculturality, inculturation, acculturation, enculturation. We conclude with analyses of the promises, limits and criticisms of the inculturation of faith. The scope is to propose a new hermeneutics for the inculturation of the faith, which recognizes interculturality as the a priori of the way to an inculturated evangelization in Africa-Mozambique. (shrink)