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Hermeneutics has frequently been dismissed as useful only for literary and textual analysis. Some consider it to be Eurocentric or inherently relativistic and thus unsuited to social critique. Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument that hermeneutics is a valuable tool not only for critical theory but also for robustly addressing many of the urgent issues of today.
List of contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Twin Earth and Its Horizons: On Hermeneutics, Reference, and Scientific Theory Choice
2. Critical Fusions: Toward a Genuine “Hermeneutics of Suspicion”
3. Agency, the “Politics of Memory,” and Reparative Justice: Hermeneutics and the Politics of Development
4. Toward a Hermeneutics of Race: Biology, Race, Ethnicity, and Culture
5. Concluding Reflections: Toward a New Reconciliation of Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, or Notes Toward a Hermeneutic Democracy
Appendix: Toward a Hermeneutics of the Ethical Response
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Lorenzo C. Simpson is professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University. His books include Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity (1995) and The Unfinished Project: Towards a Postmetaphysical Humanism (2001).
Summary
Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument that hermeneutics is a valuable tool not only for critical theory but also for addressing many of the urgent issues of today. He shows its utility for unpacking intractable debates in the philosophy of science, multiculturalism, social epistemology, and racial and social justice.
Additional text
Lorenzo Simpson's Hermeneutics as Critique is a path-breaking contribution to the defense of hermeneutics, not just as a method of text interpretation but also as a critical philosophy with wide-ranging power to illuminate cultural dilemmas. Hermeneutics is commonly understood to espouse a coherentist account of truth and a contextualist understanding of culture; as such, it seems devoid of an ideology-critical moment to invalidate established types and classifications or repudiate cultural belief systems. Through a lucid and elegantly written account, Simpson shows how hermeneutics can be practiced as a critical philosophy of science and of culture. The best contribution to the hermeneutics-critical theory discussion since the Habermas-Gadamer debate.
