Georgia Warnke

_Legitimate Differences_ challenges the usual portrayal of current debates over thorny social issues including abortion, pornography, affirmative action, and surrogate mothering as _moral_ debates. How can it be said that our debates oppose principles of life to those of liberty, principles of liberty to those of equality, principles of equality to those of fairness, and principles of fairness to those of integrity, when we as Americans share all these principles? Debates over such issues are not, Georgia Warnke argues, moral debates over which principles we should adopt. Rather, they are interpretive debates over the meanings of principles we already possess. Warnke traces the structure of these debates with reference to the work of Jane Austen, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Bernard Williams. In separate chapters on surrogate mothering, affirmative action, abortion, and pornography she articulates new understandings of the meanings of some of our principles and shows the equal legitimacy of some different interpretations of the meanings of others. Finally, she suggests that the orientation of American public policy ought to be directed less at finding single canonical interpretations of our principles than at accommodating different legitimate understandings of them. The perspective offered by _Legitimate Differences_ should have a significantly beneficial effect on public discussions.

The explanation versus understanding debate was important to the philosophy of the social sciences from the time of Dilthey and Weber through the work of Popper and Hempel. In recent years, with the development of interpretive approaches in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and language analysis, the problematic has become absolutely central. The broad literature to which it has given rise, while still split along "analytic" versus "continental" lines, shows increasing signs of a reunification in philosophy. G. H. von Wright's important book, Explanation and Understanding, originally published in 1971, is a good example of this trend.In Understanding and Explanation, Karl-Otto Apel takes von Wright's work as a point of departure for a rigorous, penetrating analysis of the issues involved. After reviewing the failure of earlier discussions to resolve these issues, Apel develops his own approach in light of the turn from logico-semantic to pragmatic analysis of language in post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. In doing so, he constructs bridges that reach back to themes and positions of the German tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, but from strikingly new angles.Karl-Otto Apel holds the chair for social philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. His book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy

In the past decade the work of Jurgen Habermas has sparked off a series of lively debates over modernity and post-modernity, the nature of language, the interplay of law and politics and the dilemmas of morality. Significantly, these debates unfold in the context of his particular reading of the modern philosophical tradition from the German enlightment to the present period. In this original interpretation, David Rasmussen provides both guide and critique to the later Habermas encountered in the context of the best of the critical literature that has emerged in recent years. Reading Habermas argues that Habermas' concept of modernity provides the context for the theory of language as well as his approaches to law and ethics. This book, as its title implies, offers a reading. It explores philosophical options chosen in the light of other, rejected readings. It is a distinctive, readable contribution to the current controversy surrounding the most recent developments in critical theory

Because citizens of diverse and pluralistic democracies possess different values and interests, deliberative democratic theory founds legitimate decision-making in non-coercive deliberations among free and equal citizens who appeal to public reasons or, in other words, to reasons that can be accepted by ‘all who are possibly affected’. Yet it is not clear that what stymies democratic justification is the failure to offer or accept public reasons. Can we not agree on them while understanding them in different but equally compelling ways? Indeed, might it not be that what stymies justification is our failure to acknowledge this possibility? The first part of this paper explores these questions as they relate both to the original formulations of deliberative theory and to certain revisions. The second part of the paper investigates a hermeneutic alternative that not only acknowledges but also value differences in the ways we can plausibly understand the public reasons to which we agree

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action.

Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics - one of the seminal philosophies of the 20th century - has had a profound influence on a wide array of fields, including classical philology, theology, the philosophy of the social sciences, literary theory, philosophy of law, critical social theory and the philosophy of art. This collection expands on some of these areas and takes his hermeneutics into yet new fields including narrative medicine, biotechnology, the politics of memory, the philosophy of place and the non-verbal language of the body. And, building on Gadamer's well-known discussions with Heidegger, Habermas and Derrida, Inheriting Gadamer sets him in dialogue with Mahatma Gandhi, Christine Korsgaard, Charles Mills and others. In these ways, the volume holds fast to a Gadamerian virtue: cultivating our important philosophical traditions while embracing the constant need to re-think their meaning in new circumstances and in relation to new knowledge.

This dissertation explores the significance of the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer for the current discussion of the methodology of the human sciences. Its purpose is to demonstrate the radical reorientation of this discussion that Gadamer's perspective suggests and to examine the consequences to which this leads. My thesis is that while Gadamer is successful in elucidating the historicity underlying social and historical understanding, he confuses two different dimensions of the argument: that history prejudices all social and historical thought, and that such thought aims at consensus or fusion with its history. Because of this confusion, he is unable to specify criteria for choosing between different developments in social and historical self-understanding. Understanding in the human sciences becomes a form of reaching agreement with a historical process that cannot be controlled. ;The dissertation is composed of four chapters. The first examines the Anglo-American discussion of the logic of the social sciences, tracing the conceptual dynamic which leads from Carl Hempel's "The Function of General Laws in History" to Peter Winch's neo-Wittgensteinian analysis. The second chapter focuses on the German hermeneutic tradition from F. D. E. Schleiermacher through Wilhelm Dilthey. Both chapters attempt to indicate the "objectivistic" orientation of pre-Gadamerian accounts of the human sciences insofar as the implications of their historicity are not adequately comprehended. ;Chapter Three concentrates on Gadamer's hermeneutic perspective as it is elucidated in Truth and Method. I focus on three crucial components of this position: the concept of effective history, the identification of hermenuetic understanding as a form of practical philosophy and the argument for the dialogic structure of the interpretive process. These analyses clarify the implications of the historicity of the social and historical sciences. Because they are involved in the human world they study, they cannot be conceived as methods of acquiring insight into an independent object-domain; they rather contribute to the self-understanding of the history to which both they and their objects belong. ;In Chapter Four, I draw on objections that Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel have raised against Gadamer to develop my own views. I argue that a satisfactory philosophy of the human sciences must incorporate Gadamer's insight into their historicity, but that it need not abandon them to historical contingency.