Joel Weinsheimer ( Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory ) neatly summarizes Gadamer’s argument that objectivism and subjectivism are the same thing: “Governing itself by rule, objectivity tries methodologically to eliminate bias, prejudice, and all the distortions that go by . . . . Continue Reading »
Westphal asks why Christians are hesitant to affirm the inevitability of interpretation, and answers that denying the necessity of interpretation seems to be the easiest way to affirm truth as correspondence and to preserve objectivity. If interpretation intervenes into every act of knowing, then . . . . Continue Reading »
Merold Westphal ( Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture) ) notes that “realism begins as the claim that the world (the real) is ‘out there’ and is what it is independent of whether or not we might think . . . . Continue Reading »
In his highly readable The Sublime (The New Critical Idiom) , Philip Shaw lucidly summarizes the standard distinction between the sublime and the beautiful: “The sublime is greater than the beautiful; the sublime is dark, profound, and overwhelming and implicitly masculine, whereas the . . . . Continue Reading »
Thomas wrote, “Being is two-fold: material and immaterial. In material beings, which are limited, each thing is only what it is; this stone is this stone, nothing more. But in immaterial beings, which are vast and, as it were, infinite, not being limited by matter, a thing is not only what it . . . . Continue Reading »
In his introduction to Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present , Kurt Mueller-Vollmer gives us a very Hamannian Schleiermacher: “Man, the linguistic being, can be seen as the place where language articulates iself in each speech act and where . . . . Continue Reading »
One reads Bultmann on eschatology and thinks, How Kantian! Then one thinks: Or is it the other way round? Is Bultmann a Kantianization of Christian eschatology, or is Kant a philosophical riff on Lutheran or Pietist eschatology? One reads Bultmann on history and eschatology and hears Derrida . . . . Continue Reading »
Imagination, that is the “power of forming images” is indispensable “in our ordinary, not just extraordinary beliefs and projects in science, philosophy, religion, and in common sense.” So argue philosophy Charles Taliaferro and artist Jil Evans in their recent Image in . . . . Continue Reading »
In reaction to modern or postmodern subjectivism, Christians often pound on “objectivity.” This is often no solution, but only a shift from one pole to another within the same paradigm. In fact, subject and object are not neatly separated from one another. Subjects are objects in the . . . . Continue Reading »
I organize some scattered thoughts on the good of authority over at http://www.firstthings.com/ . . . . . Continue Reading »
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