John J. Davenport

Tradition must rank as one of the ten most important works within the hermeneutic tradition to be published in the 1990s, alongside recent books by Jean-Luc Nancy, Drucilla Cornell, Simon Critchley, John Caputo, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida. In Tradition, Stephen Watson, who is influenced by Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Alasdair MacIntyre, works out a historical hermeneutics with obvious connections to their views, but that also stakes out a different position "between" their respective accounts of reason, interpretation, and tradition. This work builds on themes introduced in Watson's earlier collection of essays, such as his paper on "Between Truth and Method: Gadamer, Traditionality, and the Problem of Justification in Interpretative Practices." In the process, Watson also develops his innovative approaches to many particular figures in the history of modern philosophy, to their influence on and significance for one another, and most importantly, to an array of fundamental questions concerning the canons of reason, the status of personal subjects, and basic ethical concepts like friendship, character, and the good. It is in his treatment of these themes especially—and his general suspicion of transcendental methodology and universal principles—that we perhaps see the Aristotelian influences most clearly in this text. At the same time, Watson's is always a deconstructive version of Aristotelianism, refracted through his reading of Heidegger, whose notion of Erwiderung, or "reciprocal rejoinder" with past thinkers in the formation of new ideas is introduced on the first page and becomes the schema both for his analysis of tradition and his treatment of individual authors.