•  7
    The Diversity of Languages and Understanding the World
    with Hans-Georg Gadamer
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (2): 453-466. 2024.
    This is my translation of Gadamer's 1990 lecture "The Diversity of Languages and Understanding of the World." "In his lecture, Gadamer presents his views of language and world in a distinctively hermeneutical key. For example, he emphasizes language as that which 'belongs to conversation.' That is, language as conversation helps to bring about understanding and involves the play of dialogical exchange. 'Language is not proposition and judgment; rather, it is what it is, only when it is question …Read more
  •  2
    Gadamer's Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary (edited book)
    Rowman & Littlefield. 2022.
  •  4
    This book offers a sustained scholarly analysis of Gadamer's reflections on art and our experience of art. It examines fundamental themes in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics such as play, festival, symbol, contemporaneity, enactment, art's performative ontology, and hermeneutical identity. The first two chapters focus on Gadamer's critical appropriation and movement beyond Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics (and includes a coda on Heidegger's influence). The final three chapters argue for the con…Read more
  •  46
    Music and Time
    with Hans-Georg Gadamer and David Liakos
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (1): 251-258. 2021.
    This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1988 essay, “Musik und Zeit: Ein philosophisches Postscriptum.” The essay, although brief, is noteworthy in that it contains Gadamer’s philosophical reflections on music—reflections which are largely absent in his masterwork, Truth and Method. In the essay, one finds several important Gadamerian hermeneutical themes such as the notion of art as performance or enactment (Vollzug), the linguisticality of understanding, the importance of lingering with …Read more
  •  2378
    Gadamer's Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary (edited book)
    with Greg Lynch
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2022.
    Gadamer's Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary offers a fresh look at Gadamer's magnum opus, Truth and Method, which was first published in German in 1960, translated into English in 1975, and is widely recognized as a ground-breaking text of philosophical hermeneutics. The volume features essays from fourteen scholars--both established and rising stars--each of which cover a portion of Truth and Method following the order of the text itself. The result is a robust, historically and themati…Read more
  •  23
    This article considers the limitations, but also the insights, of Gadamerian hermeneutics for understanding and responding to the crisis precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Our point of departure is the experience of deep disagreements amid the pandemic, and our primary example is ongoing debates in the United States about wearing masks. We argue that, during this dire situation, interpersonal mutual understanding is insufficient for resolving such bitter disputes. Rather, following Gadamer’s…Read more
  •  268
    Translators’ Abstract: This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s recently discovered 1952 Berlin speech. The speech includes several themes that reappear in Truth and Method, as well as in Gadamer’s later writings such as Reason in the Age of Science. For example, Gadamer criticizes positivism, modern philosophy’s orientation toward positivism, and Enlightenment narratives of progress, while presenting his view of philosophy’s tasks in an age of crisis. In addition, he discusses structural p…Read more
  •  19
    Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 72 (3). 2019.
    A mini-review of Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy.
  •  189
    Like human existence itself, our enduring legacies—whether poetic, ethical, political, or philosophical—continually unfold and require recurrent communal engagement and (re)enactment. In other words, an ongoing performance of significant works must occur, and this task requires the collective human activity of re-membering or gathering-together-again. In the Symposium, Diotima provides an account of human pursuits of immortality through the creation of artifacts, including laws, poems, and philo…Read more
  •  242
    Racism (Encyclopedia Entry)
    In Robert L. Fastiggi, Joseph W. Koterski, Brendan Sweetman & Victor Salas (eds.), New Catholic Encyclopedia: Supplement 2012-2013: Ethics and Philosophy, Gale. 2013.
  •  47
    The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (review)
    Philotheos International Journal for Philosophy and Theology 6. 2006.
    Review of L. Dupre's Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture
  •  6
    Fanon’s insistence that the oppressed retain their ability to resist and (re)configure their subjectivity has political, ethical, and philosophical import, as it highlights the fact that the subjugated are not mere things determined from the outside. To the contrary, just as several contingent factors coalesced to create the historical situation in which the colonized subject finds herself, other equally contingent factors can emerge and help to bring about socio-political transformations. Like …Read more
  •  58
    Although Gadamer has been criticized, on the one hand, for being a “traditionalist” and on the other, for embracing relativism, I argue that his approach to knowing, being, and being-in-the world offers contemporary theorists a third way, which is both historically attuned and able to address significant social and ethical questions.
  •  744
    In this chapter, I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and aesthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (…Read more
  •  520
    In this essay, I analyze Romare Bearden’s art, methodology, and thinking about art, as well as his attempt to harmonize his personal aesthetic goals with his sociopolitical concerns. I then turn to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflections on art and our experience (Erfahrung) of art. I show how Bearden’s approach to art and the artworks themselves resonate with Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic consciousness and his contention that artworks address us, make claims upon us, and even reveal truth. Lastly, I…Read more
  •  248
    In Interstitial Soundings, Cynthia R. Nielsen brings music and philosophy into a fruitful and mutually illuminating dialogue. Topics discussed include the following: music's dynamic ontology, performers and improvisers as co-composers, the communal character of music, jazz as hybrid and socially constructed, the sociopolitical import of bebop, Afro-modernism and its strategic deployments, jazz and racialized practices, continuities between Michel Foucault's discussion of self-making and creating…Read more
  •  29
    Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (review)
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 84 (1): 166-168. 2010.
  •  622
    Although contemporary Western culture and criticism has usually valued composition over improvisation and placed the authority of a musical work with the written text rather than the performer, this essay posits these divisions as too facile to articulate the complex dynamics of making music in any genre or form. Rather it insists that music should be understood as pieces that are created with specific intentions by composers but which possess possibilities of interpretation that can only be br…Read more
  •  1387
    Foucault’s later writings continue his analyses of subject-formation but now with a view to foregrounding an active subject capable of self-transformation via ascetical and other self-imposed disciplinary practices. In my essay, I engage Foucault’s studies of ancient Greco-Roman and Christian technologies of the self with a two-fold purpose in view. First, I bring to the fore additional continuities either downplayed or overlooked by Foucault’s analysis between Greco-Roman transformative practi…Read more
  •  384
    Through examining Douglass's and Fanon's concrete experiences of oppression, Cynthia R. Nielsen demonstrates the empirical validity of Foucault's theoretical analyses concerning power, resistance, and subject-formation. Going beyond merely confirming Foucault's insights, Douglass and Fanon expand, strengthen, and offer correctives to the emancipatory dimensions of Foucault's project. Unlike Foucault, Douglass and Fanon were not hesitant to make transhistorical judgments condemning slavery and co…Read more
  •  5821
    Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty’s overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-…Read more
  •  46
    Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration (book chapter)
    with Eric Anthamatten, Anders Benander, Natalie Cisneros, Michael DeWilde, Vincent Greco, Timothy Greenlee, Spoon Jackson, Arlando Jones, Drew Leder, Chris Lenn, John Douglas Macready, Lisa McLeod, William Muth, Aislinn O’Donnell, and Andre Pierce
    Lexington Books. 2014.
    Western philosophy’s relationship with prisons stretches from Plato’s own incarceration to the modern era of mass incarceration. Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration draws together a broad range of philosophical thinkers, from both inside and outside prison walls, in the United States and beyond, who draw on a variety of critical perspectives (including phenomenology, deconstruction, and feminist theory) and historical and contemporary figures in philosophy …Read more
  •  12
    Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 56 (4): 421-424. 2016.
    Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and GadamerDaveyNicholasedinburgh university press. 2013. pp. viii + 190. £70.00.
  •  431
    This essay is concerned with Gadamer’s reflections on solidarity and practice as found in several of his later writings. While Gadamer offers a robust explanation of practice, practical reason, and how both are operative in solidarities, his investigations of solidarity are in no way systematic. He does, however, distinguish two aspects of solidarity, viz. what one might call “natural solidarity” and “avowed solidarity”. In contrast to natural solidarities, avowed solidarities require an intenti…Read more
  •  732
    St. Augustine on text and reality (and a little Gadamerian spice)
    Heythrop Journal 50 (1): 98-108. 2009.
    One way of viewing the organizing structure of the Confessions is to see it as an engagement with various texts at different phases of St. Augustine’s life. In the early books of the Confessions, Augustine describes the disordered state that made him unable to read any text (sacred or profane) properly. Yet following his conversion his entire orientation— not only to texts but also to reality as a whole—changes. This essay attempts to trace the winding paths that lead up to Augustine’s conversio…Read more