Georgia Warnke

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.

For many deliberative theorists, the importance of a public exchange of reasons lies in its capacity to improve the quality of democratic decision making. The 1831-1832 debate over abolishing slavery in Virginia in the state’s House of Delegates raises the question of whether it can do so on its own. The bigotry of those opposing the abolition of Virginian slavery was matched only by the prejudice of those advocating for its end. This paper examines James Bohman’s sophisticated defense of deliberative democracy but argues for the value of negative and disclosive experience.

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.

Armour's Being and Idea begins with the felt need for unity, the need at the base of the philosophies of both Spinoza and Hegel and a need increasingly felt by us who inhabit a modern or postmodern world. "Sometimes," Armour writes, "we are looking for a unity of knowledge which will enable us to 'make sense of' the various things that we know. Sometimes we are looking for a thread that will link together the seemingly meaningless events of our lives. Sometimes we are looking for a unity between the source of 'explanation' of the world and the world of appearances. Sometimes we are looking for a unity of principle either in our moral affairs or in our scientific explanations".

Commentators have compared Hans-Georg Gadamer’s focus on tradition in Truth and Method to his focus on solidarity in his later work in order to suggest that the latter signals a move away from ontological toward ethical and political concerns. This paper, however, is guided by Gadamer’s own view that his work, both early, late, and in Truth and Method, was always concerned with ethical and political issues. I therefore want to challenge the idea that his so-called politics of solidarity marks a new direction in his work. His politics of solidarity does mark a new direction in discussions of solidarity insofar as he disconnects it from any necessary grounding in preexisting affinities such as religion and nationality. Gadamer’s later work may also be more explicitly concerned with the question of differences and the other than is Truth and Method. Nevertheless, I want to argue that rather than signaling a new direction for Gadamer, both his politics of solidarity and his concern with otherness highlight important features already present in his earlier account of tradition. Indeed, I think attention to this earlier account discloses a political dimension to Gadamer’s thought that is more sophisticated than his remarks on solidarity. Attention to this dimension of his earlier account allows us to challenge the now standard objection that it undermines possibilities for critical reflection

The ideal of deliberative democracy grounds the legitimate use of state power in free public reasoning among equals. It does not conceive of democratic decision-making as a mere aggregate of individual preferences. Instead, in public debates over proposed policies and programs, citizens advance considerations they think can be compelling to others who may possess values and commitments different from their own. Decisions are collective, then, in the sense that they reflect a process of reasoning to which all citizens can agree. At the same time, decisions respect pluralism insofar as they acknowledge the differences in the values and commitments of a diverse body of citizens. As Joshua Cohen writes

Richard Rorty challenges the traditional use of hermeneutic understanding to defend the methodological autonomy of the social sciences, claiming that hermeneutics is part of both social and natural science and, moreover, that it exposes the limits of ?epistemologically centered philosophy?. Hermeneutics is interested in edification rather than truth, in finding new ways of speaking rather than adjudicating knowledge claims or securing the grounds of rational consensus. Although Rorty refers to Gadamer's ?philosophical hermeneutics? as support for this position, Gadamer's own analysis points in a different direction. First, it distinguishes the social from the natural sciences as forms of practical, not theoretical, knowledge. As hermeneutic analyses, the social sciences participate in an on?going dialogue about values and forms of life. Second, the goal of this dialogue is cognitive and normative agreement. Indeed, hermeneutics is an act of integration which tries to expand consensus between different cultures and historical perspectives by mediating their claims to truth

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.