•  431
    Is Philosophical Hermeneutics Self-Refuting?
    Review of Metaphysics 75 (4): 751-777. 2022.
    One of the fundamental theses of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is that all knowledge is historically conditioned. This thesis appears to be self-refuting. That is, it appears to contradict itself insofar as its assertion that every knowledge claim is historically conditioned seems to assert an absolute, unconditionally true knowledge claim. If the historicity thesis does, in fact, refute itself in this way, then that spells trouble for philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer was well aware of…Read more
  •  281
    Sunesis: Understanding (its) Deeper Meaning in the Classical Period
    Rheinisches Museum Für Philologie. forthcoming.
    This article argues that the meaning of σύνεσις in the classical period has been inadequately understood, and consequently its historical significance has likely been misplaced. The traditional view is that the word possessed two basic meanings. First and foremost, σύνεσις meant a general ability to understand. Second and less frequently, it meant moral conscience or some such ability to judge the morality of human choice and action. However, by considering anew the attestations of σύνεσις and i…Read more
  •  269
  •  205
    Should college teachers still teach works with immoral content? What if the works are by deeply immoral thinkers? This guide is intended to help us answer these sorts of pedagogical questions by articulating the pertinent moral issues and then suggesting strategies for navigating them.
  •  179
    Language as Medium of Hermeneutic Experience
    In Gregory Lynch & Cynthia R. Nielsen (eds.), Gadamer's Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 209-226. 2022.
    This paper provides a commentary on Truth and Method III.1.
  •  102
    Listening to Reason in Plato and Aristotle, by Dominic Scott (review)
    History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis. forthcoming.
  •  62
    The Limits of Definition: Gadamer’s Critique of Aristotle’s Ethics
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (6): 1176-1196. 2018.
    There is a recent scholarly trend drawing similarities between Aristotle’s conceptions of ethics and demonstrative science. One such similarity has become widely and rightly recognized: for Aristotle both ethics and demonstrative science seek essential definitions of phenomena. The task of the paper is to show that German philosopher and classicist Hans-Georg Gadamer not only prefigured this interpretative trend, he also identified a problematic feature of Aristotle’s method so construed. The pr…Read more
  •  50
    Translation: The Socratic Question and Aristotle, by Hans-Georg Gadamer
    Continental Philosophy Review 48 (1): 95-102. 2015.
    Translator's Introduction: Hans-Georg Gadamer first published this essay in 1991 in his Gesammelte Werke, but it appeared shortly before in a Gedenkschrift for Karl-Heinz Ilting, a scholar of German Idealism and ancient philosophy who studied under Gadamer’s colleague, Erich Rothacker. The essay is the product of a lifetime of studies in Plato and Aristotle, reflecting in particular Gadamer’s ongoing preoccupation with the “Socratic question” and the development of his views on it since his Habi…Read more
  •  46
    Aristotle and the Endoxic Method
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (3): 383-405. 2017.
    This paper challenges the ‘Standard Account’ of the so-called endoxic method that Aristotle articulates in a well-known passage from book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics. That account is problematic because it misreads what Aristotle says and thereby attributes to him an unusually rigid and conservative method that he himself does not seem to employ. This paper carefully analyzes the semantics and syntax of the book VII passage in order to present a novel and improved understanding of the endoxic …Read more
  •  46
    Universality in Aristotle’s Ethics
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (2): 181-201. 2016.
    According to many scholars, Aristotle holds that judgments in ethics can hold true only “for the most part”. Such judgments state general claims about ethical life, not specific claims about how to act in a particular situation. These judgments can be either descriptive or prescriptive. When they are descriptive, they hold true “for the most part” insofar as they express observed regularities that occur neither always and necessarily, nor by mere chance. For example, courage is good “for the mos…Read more
  •  33
    The Eudemian Ethics of Aristotle, by Peter L.P. Simpson (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 67 (3): 668-670. 2014.
  •  33
    A Phenomenological Argument Against Instrumentalism
    European Journal of Philosophy 30 (4): 1268-1281. 2021.
    Instrumentalism as a theory of practical reasoning has been both widely held and difficult to dethrone. The theory holds that good practical reasoning need only involve determining suitable means to pre-determined ends. The theory is difficult to dethrone because critiques of it tend to specify aspects of reasoning that either do not seem practical, strictly speaking, or can be re-described as a series of episodes of means-end reasoning. Either way, instrumentalism dodges these criticisms raised…Read more
  •  29
    Aristotle’s Moral Realism Reconsidered: Phenomenological Ethics, by Pavlos Kontos (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 52 (3): 373-377. 2012.
  •  23
    Gadamer's Phenomenological Ethics
    European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 746-757. 2021.
    Hans-Georg Gadamer held that the chief task of philosophy today is to defend practical reason against the encroachments of techno-scientific rationality and thereby to ground the possibility for a philosophical ethics. Although this is well-known and much discussed in the secondary literature, there is curiously sparse discussion of just what Gadamer took ethical inquiry to be. The little discussion that exists tends either to neglect Gadamer's distinction between practical reasoning and philoso…Read more
  •  17
    Aristotle's Method in Ethics, by Joseph Karbowski (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 73 (2): 367-370. 2019.
  •  13
    The aim of this paper is threefold. First, I defend the view that for Aristotle ethical inquiry, like all philosophical inquiry, is in the business of seeking scientific explanations. This defense will require (in section II) first describing the basic structure of such explanations and then showing how those explanations can either be found in or endorsed by Aristotle’s ethics. My description of scientific explanation should be relatively uncontroversial, and my subsequent discussion of scienti…Read more
  • The Role of Aristotle in Gadamer's Work
    In Theodore George & Gert-Jan van der Heiden (eds.), The Gadamerian Mind, . pp. 207-220. 2021.
    This chapter reassesses the role of Aristotle in Gadamer’s work. Gadamer is sometimes read as preferential to Plato over Aristotle. Such a reading, however, displaces the centrality of Aristotle to Gadamer’s thought. Gadamer saw Aristotle, and not Plato, as the first phenomenologist. Gadamer consequently expressed a great debt to Aristotle, not only for modeling a phenomenological approach to philosophy, but also for the illuminating phenomenological descriptions that Aristotle gave. Both his ph…Read more
  • This book presents the first detailed treatment of Gadamer’s account of the nature of meaning. It argues both that this account is philosophically valuable in its own right and that understanding it sheds new light on his wider hermeneutical project. Whereas philosophers have typically thought of meanings as belonging to a special class of objects, the central claim of Gadamer’s view is that meanings are events. Instead of a pre-existing content that we must unearth through our interpretive effo…Read more