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13European and American PhilosophersIn Robert L. Arrington (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophers, Blackwell. 2017.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 Categ…Read more
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18Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary EthicsPhilosophical Quarterly 46 (183): 273-276. 1996.
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8Historical Understanding and “The Blemish of Extraordinary Moral Legacies”Philosophy of Education 73 33-56. 2017.
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17Book ReviewsRaymond Geuss,. Outside Ethics.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 320. $59.50 ; $24.95Ethics 117 (2): 352-356. 2007.
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11Book ReviewPaul Ricoeur,. The Just. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xxiv+155. $20.00 (review)Ethics 112 (2): 406-408. 2002.
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43Virginia’s Slavery DeliberationsPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (2): 218-236. 2018.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 delibe…Read more
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13Heidegger: Thought and historicity : Christopher Fynsk , 229 pp., S27.45 cloth (review)History of European Ideas 9 (5): 616-617. 1988.
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Hermeneutics and the Critique of Positivism: Gadamer's Contribution to the Philosophy of the Human SciencesDissertation, Boston University Graduate School. 1982.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 histo…Read more
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101The Hermeneutic Circle versus DialogueReview of Metaphysics 65 (1): 91-112. 2011.At the start of his account of hermeneutic experience, Gadamer quotes Heidegger: “Our first, last and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.” Heidegger’s “fore-structures” reflect our practical pre-understanding and ongoing engagement with our world or “the things themselves.” Yet,…Read more
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18Deliberation and interpretationPhilosophy and Social Criticism 39 (8): 755-770. 2013.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…Read more
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Politics and literary criticism: A hermeneutic viewRevue Internationale de Philosophie 54 (213): 423-446. 2000.
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32Justice and interpretation (edited book)MIT Press. 1992.The presumption behind this book is that recent developments in political philosophy can be productively assessed under the idea of a hermeneutic or ...
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41Feminism and HermeneuticsHypatia 8 (1). 1993.Feminists often look to postmodern philosophy for a framework within which to treat difference. We might more productively look to a hermeneutic philosophy that emphasizes the interpretive dimensions of difference and allows us to acknowledge the partiality of our understanding. Hence, we might also recognize the importance of a hermeneutic conversation unconstrained by relations of power or ideology in which all nonexclusionary interpretive voices can be educated by one another
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47Solidarity and tradition in Gadamer's hermeneuticsHistory and Theory 51 (4): 6-22. 2012.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 …Read more
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30Being and Idea (review)Review of Metaphysics 48 (2): 389-390. 1994.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…Read more
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465THE AFTER OF IDENTITY: RESPONSE TO ALCOFF, BARTHOLD, SHRAGE, AND ZACKReview Journal of Political Philosophy 10 65-84. 2012.
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42Interpretive DemocracyGraduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 26 (1): 47-64. 2005.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…Read more
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49Hermeneneutics and the social sciences: A Gadamerian critique of RortyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 28 (1-4). 1985.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 G…Read more
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29Debating Sex and GenderOup Usa. 2010.The fifth volume in the Fundamentals of Philosophy Series, Debating Sex and Gender by Georgia Warnke is a concise yet in-depth introduction to contemporary feminist thought on sex and gender.
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122Intersexuality and the categories of sexHypatia 16 (3): 126-137. 2001.: Operations on intersexuals indicate that the sex of a person is based on more than biology. Expectations about proper gender activities furnish the frameworks through which certain features and combinations of features are understood to be fundamental to bodies and to comprise their sex. Yet, we can ask whether this interpretation is either coherent or consistent with our fuller conceptions of ourselves. Is there a point to interpreting a person as a sex?
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University of California, RiversideAssociate Professor
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |