Interpretative Horizons Research Articles

The life of the undead: Biopower, Latino anxiety and the epidemiological paradox

This article studies the dense interconnections between biopower, psychoanalysis, psychology and theories of Latino/a health and disease in the context of the ubiquitous claim heard nowadays regarding the so-called inevitable early twenty-first-century Latinization of the United States. How do we, the author asks, understand the theories of Latino/a health, disease, normality and pathology emerging out of epidemiological research on Latino/as and out of the professional psychotherapeutic literature on Latino/as within the broader interpretive horizon of US biopolitical practices that both manage and incite life? This paper explores this question by paying specific attention to the diagnosis of “anxiety” in the psychotherapeutic literature on Latino/as and to the conundrum in epidemiological research on Latino/a health referred to as the “epidemiological paradox.”

O hispano-americanismo historiográfico: Espanha e América na perspectiva de Ricardo Levene e Rafael Altamira

This article analyzes how Latin American history was interpreted by two eminent historians, the Argentine Ricardo Levene and the Spaniard Rafael Altamira. It discusses how their paths crossed in the advocacy of Hispano-Americanism as a political project and interpretive horizon of Iberian and American history. Key words: Hispano-Americanism, Ricardo Levene, Rafael Altamira.

Nooreestlased arvustuses ja arvustajatena: lugejakontseptsioonist 20. sajandi alguse kriitikas. The Young Estonians as Critics and in the Eyes of Critics: On the Concept of the Reader in Early 20th Century Estonia

Until recently, the treatment of Estonian literature from the beginning of the 20th century has been influenced by the literary and cultural activities and programmatic articles of the Young Estonia movement. Current research on Young Estonia has addressed their more everyday realm of activity, which has heretofore received less attention: the Young Estonians as readers of the new works of their literary contemporaries and their practical criticism in reviews, particularly in daily newspapers. This article uses a receptionhistorical approach to analyze a large body of source material: the Young Estonians voluminous critical oeuvre in the period 1905–1915. The Young Estonians to be examined are all members of the core group of the movement: Gustav Suits, Bernhard Linde, Aino Kallas, Johannes Aavik, Villem Grunthal-Ridala, Jaan Oks, August Alle, and Johannes Semper. Within the larger framework of collective horizons of expectation, the focus of the study is the critics` concept of the reader. In addition, I will briefly discuss the dynamics of how such conceptions change. Research results indicate that in critical reviews from the time of Young Estonia, the topic of the reader was addressed from different standpoints depending on the addressee. Texts directed rhetorically toward a broad readership are characterized by the pursuit of objectivity and generalizations. When the concept of the reader is critic-centered, the text emphasizes subjective judgments, experience, and emotion. When focusing on the author and the text, the reviewer describes the influence on the reader, the cause of which is either the literary work directly or the author’s genius. In the case of polemic on the subject of reading, found mainly in responses written to reviews, the writer interprets another reader (or other readers`) reading, opposing it to his or her own. When we follow the way the readers of Young Estonia and the Young Estonians themselves handle the characteristics and functions of the reader, it becomes apparent that the reader is defined primarily according to relations – whether these are with the author, the text, the content, the critic, the reader himself/ herself, or with literature in general. The reader is regarded as a passive subject in the literary process who needs to be influenced by the author and directed by the critic. At the beginning of the era of Young Estonia, the reader’s primary role is seen as supporting original literary works. Those critics who did not belong to Young Estonia’s core group orient themselves to the common reader, and to a heterogenous content familiar from everyday life. The Young Estonians` longing for „better” literature, and expectations connected with the literary representation of educated people are aimed at authors; there is also the expectation that educated people will form a readership. In the middle of the Young Estonia period, topics of ongoing discussion include the question of rereading, or repeated reading of books, and prejudices formed based on an author’s prior works and the broader literary context. In mid-period, a clearer separation comes into focus between reviewer and reader, and the judgments of readers and reviewers can be seen to diverge. Toward the end of the period, the evaluation of literary texts takes a further step from the search for objective values toward recognizing the individuality of the reader. In conclusion, during the decade 1905–1915, the definition of the reader in the eyes of the critic underwent an expansion, merging with the Young Estonians’ specific expectations. Though the Young Estonians’ own principles – quite resolute at first – later became somewhat tempered, they still maintained their elitist positions and uncompromising stance toward their opposition. The result is an enrichment in the criteria for judging literature rather than a replacement of one set of criteria by another. Horizons of interpretation continue to approach one another, until the horizon of expectation of Young Estonia’s readers, their reviewers and critics incorporate the Young Estonians’ own positions with respect to readers and reading. In the process, the Young Estonians themselves are but donors, growing a readership, and through their efforts toward differentiation, also extending the reach of expectations directed at readers.

O potrzebie afiliacji jako pułapce w świecie mediów na przykładzie tekstów zamieszczanych w „Naszym Dzienniku”

The media, while fulfilling the needs of individuals, may also influence people. A fundamental and relevant psychological need is the desire for acceptance and, connected with it, the need for affiliation. The enhancement of self-esteem achieved by gaining support for the professed opinions, the feeling of security resulting from being a member of a particular group, which eliminates fear, may lead to conformism. The addressor, willing to influence the recipient, can refer to their common interpretative horizon, axiological agreement and common good, thus, by means of ingratiation, can bring about a change in the recipient`s attitude. The aim of the article is to indicate integrative linguistic devices applied by mass media which make the persuasive action easier. Referring to friendship makes persuasion and manipulation much more simple; opposing the community may result in exclusion.

Beyond the Shade of the Oak Tree: The Recent Growth of Johannine Studies

The recent growth within Johannine studies has developed as a result of several factors. First, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls led to an appreciation of the Jewishness of John's origin. Second, new approaches to John's composition have emerged, followed by a larger set of inquiries as to the Johannine tradition's relation to parallel traditions. This has been accompanied by a fourth interest: the history of the Johannine situation. Fifth, new literary studies have posed new horizons for interpretation, and sixth, theories continue to abound on the identity of the Beloved Disciple. A seventh development involves new ways of conceiving John's theological features, leading to an eighth: reconsidering John's historical features and re-envisioning its historical contributions in new perspective.

Jean Baruzi y el problema del símbolo sanjuanista

The article analyses and discusses the concepts of symbol and allegory in relation to Jean Baruzi’s classic study of the poetry of St. John of the Cross, Saint John of the Cross and the Problem of Mystical Experience. These concepts have been accepted to greater or lesser degree by the majority of St. John of the Cross criticism. My reading attempts to trace the historical circumstances that conditioned Baruzi’s approach and argues for the need to reassess the reach and the pertinence of applying these aesthetic categories in the interpretation of 16th century mystical poetry, taking the conditions and unique specifics determined by the epoch and the parameters of the tradition of Christian mysticism as interpretive horizon.

En los orígenes del federalismo mexicano. Problemas historiográficos recientes

In this article I intend to reflect on the recent interpretations by the mexicanist historiography devoted to the study of the establishment of federalism in Mexico. Focus is centered in the proposals which review the predominant positions in order to recognize the historical problems entwined in them and to depict their interpretative horizons and perspectives. I would like to emphasize that the historians dealt with here developed a program that suggests new ways of approaching research. As in all processes, which usually are full of accidents and disagreements, the results, now in ours hands, are exciting. Continuity and discontinuity, long and short duration, multicausality are current preoccupations of historians. The field of the study is extended and is most complex.

Spirituality and Mysticism: A Global View

Reviewed by: Spirituality and Mysticism: A Global View Michael E. Lee (bio) Spirituality and Mysticism: A Global View. By James A. Wiseman. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006. 242pp. $20.00 The instructor of Christianity faces daunting tasks in the typical university classroom. In a period of specialization, how does one provide students a broad sense of a two thousand year old tradition? How does one offer a history of Christianity that moves beyond the great texts and considers art, liturgy, and modes of discipleship? Moreover, how does one achieve this while giving due attention to those marginalized voices being retrieved by contemporary scholarship, the voices of women and of Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? In his short but ambitious book, James Wiseman provides a very useful resource to those who would take on the aforementioned tasks and examine the Christian tradition with an eye to the great contributions being made by the development of spirituality as an academic discipline. Though the book might be of interest to the general reader because of its clear prose and readability, its brief, almost encyclopedic, treatment of figures and the questions for reflection that conclude each chapter seem to make it best suited for a classroom. In the hands of a knowledgeable instructor, this book can be used as a serviceable map, providing students a big picture that can be filled out as the instructor chooses. It has ten chapters divided into three sections: chapters one and two focus on spirituality and biblical spirituality, respectively; chapters three through seven conduct a chronological sweep of Christian spirituality from early Christianity to the Reformation; and finally, the last three chapters focus on modern Christian spirituality in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Appearing as part of Orbis Books's "Theology in Global Perspective" series, the book can be likened to an atlas in the scope of its coverage of Christian history and the wide-ranging impact of spirituality upon this history. Wiseman opens the book with a helpful exploration of how current authors are using the terms "spirituality" and "mysticism." Supported by good footnotes, the reader is introduced to the work of important figures such as Sandra Schneiders, Walter Principe, and Bernard McGinn. Wiseman concludes this chapter by drawing on Lonergan's notion of "functional specialties" to stress the variety of tasks required by the study of spirituality. All in all, this offers a fine primer for the student with no previous knowledge of the area. [End Page 233] The second chapter of the text is entitled, "Biblical Spirituality," a title whose ambiguity is utilized by the author. Wiseman presents both a sketch of the spirituality of the biblical authors and the different forms of exegesis that have guided spiritualities. If that represents an enormous amount of material to cover in one chapter, then it signals both a strength and weakness of Wiseman's global task throughout the book. Sketching the spirituality of the First Testament in four pages is simply too difficult a task to execute justly. Here is a case where the global view flattens out too much of the interesting topography. The text functions better when Wiseman utilizes the biblical tale of Abraham as a lens through which to examine the history of biblical interpretation. Some might quibble with the manner that Wiseman divides biblical interpretation into pre-modern, modern, and post-modern paradigms—a schema he adopts from David Tracy. The problem lies not so much with this categorization itself, but rather how it omits one of the significant aspects of Tracy's nomenclature. For Tracy, working out of a Gadamerian viewpoint, postmodern readings of scriptures are not only characterized by the way they spot systemic distortions in the text, but by a fundamental shift in position in relation to the text itself. While modern historical-critical methods looked "in" and "behind" the text, postmodern methods ask about that meaning "in front" of the text; that is, they pay attention to the interpretive horizon of the reader as an essential component of the elucidation of meaning. So, while Wiseman correctly identifies the work of feminist biblical scholars, such as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Phyllis Tribble, as postmodern, he focuses on their...

What Should the 'Political' in Political Theory Explore?*

IT is now commonplace among ever-increasing numbers of political theorists to query the state of the art of the sub-discipline, in particular the epistemological and ideal-type disposition of contemporary political philosophy. But it is less common to detail research agenda that attempt to redress the balance and reconnect political theory to the domain of politics. Prior to accomplishing that, a lacuna has to be identified—a gap that exists prominently between the main schools that currently occupy centre stage in the study of political thought. Political philosophy, the history of political thought and, more recently, what could be very loosely called ‘post-structural’ or ‘continental’ political theory have virtually monopolized the analysis of political thinking; yet, as I shall claim, they do not cover the field of what constitutes political thought. Political philosophy brings to the study of political theory an overriding concern with either or both of the following: the logical validity and argumentative coherence of the political philosophy in question, or the moral rightness of the prescriptions it contains. Many of its versions display a flight from the political, the crowding out of diversity and the shrinking of the political to an area of constructed consensus guided by a vision of the good life; while its methods rely heavily on thought experiments and frequently inapplicable modelling. The history of political thought brings to the study of political theory an overriding concern with the genealogy of arguments, with the conditions for their stability and the causes for their transformation, with contexts, reconstructions of intentions, and changing horizons of interpretation but, with a few notable exceptions, sacrifices synchrony for diachrony. Much post-structuralist thought regards politics as obfuscating reality through the articulation of illusions and false categories, while expressing deep distrust towards politics as it is, and is overridingly The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 13, Number 2, 2005, pp. 113–134

Relative Meanings or Relative Truths?

Meaning and International Relations. Edited by Peter Mandaville, Andrew Williams. London: Routledge, 2003. 192 pp., $80.00 (ISBN: 0-415-2812-X). The dozen essays collected in Peter Mandaville and Andrew Williams's Meaning and International Relations each support a central, unifying contention: that variations in meaning merit special attention in international studies. At first, this proposition seems eminently uncontroversial. Even the most orthodox behavioralists recognize that meanings vary. They consequently devote much attention to defining terms and to assessing how faithfully their operational measures mirror the concepts those terms represent. But the interpretivist and self-consciously heterodox contributors to Meaning and International Relations propose that we go farther by treating contested meanings as an object of inquiry. As Mandaville summarizes in his concluding essay, these contributors ask us to treat international relations as a crucible within which competing meanings and accounts commingle as they vie for acceptance. Moreover, Mandaville notes, they ask us to approach the subject hermeneutically. That is, they ask us to understand this activity to be directed toward the fusion of interpretive horizons among persons whose vastly different experiences engender different understandings of world events. For example, Christopher Coker in “Surfing the Zeitgeist ” juxtaposes historical Western understandings with local Asian understandings of political events to show how naturally and unconsciously Westerners misconstrued Asian political reality by imposing their alien interpretive frameworks on it. He can succeed, of course, only because contemporary Western understandings also diverge from historical Western understandings. New meanings have been fashioned in the crucible. Likewise, in “When Meaning Travels,” Mandaville recounts the effects of Muslim experiences as minorities in Western communities on their understandings of Islam, its traditions, and …

Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromzvellian Ireland by Alan J. Fletcher, and: Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland: A Repertory of Sources and Documents from the Earliest Times until c.1642 by Alan J. Fletcher (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 177 tolerant?tolerant, that is, by the standards of his day rather than ours. That Middleton propounds a theological view of sodomy is not obvious. Heller's difficultand challengeable project requires that he is able to identifyparticular characters who have committed the act, and to determine their spiritual destiny. Sodomy as an act could not be presented on the stage, and could be mentioned only elliptically. Middleton insinuates without necessary commitment to narrative specificity,daring the auditor to imagine while accepting the condition of unrepresentability. In these provocatively teasing circumstances, a fixed moral authorial intention is hard to ascertain. Grace shares with sodomy in that it too was invisible on the early modern stage. Acts of grace can be manifested only as events that most immediately are something else, and might be no more than that something else. To consolidate these acts in the mind as concretely specific events marking out the gist of a play's purpose and mean? ing can scarcely avoid detracting from both the immediacy and the ambivalence of the theatrical moment. The plays will in some sense accommodate the kind of reading that Heller advocates. Whether they require his specific interpretative horizon and demand the specific reading he advances is another matter. Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham John Jowett Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromzvellian Ireland. By Alan J. Fletcher. Cork: Cork University Press. 2000. xvi + 52opp. ?45. ISBN 1-85918-245-3. Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland: A Repertory of Sources and Documents from theEarliest Times until c.1642. By Alan J. Fletcher. Cam? bridge: Brewer. 2001. xiii + 624pp. ?90; $160. ISBN 0-85991-573-5. Ben Jonson's The Alchemist famously starts with a fart,a sort of alchemy in reverse, but that unsubtle, in-your-face opening stands as the prologue to an entertainment. In early modern Ireland, however, as Alan Fletcher demonstrates with tremendous wit and verve, not to mention formidable scholarship, the fart is an art in itself, and not just an opening gambit or untimely intervention. Indeed, breaking wind is the peculiar forte of an itinerant company of 'braigetori' (Gaelic Irish for 'farters'). To? gether with face-contortionists (muggers in the theatrical sense of the word), gambler s, harpers, acrobats, tricksters,jesters, jugglers, and hummers?no, not mummers, but hummers?the farters of Gaelic Ireland contribute to a varied and vibrant culture of performance art. Modern Irish drama is the envy of us all, but it is often portrayed as a colonial legacy, English in origin, though Irish in verbal energy. Fletcher's aim is to establish Ireland as a fulcrum of dramatic activity, steeped in traditions, local and vocal, prior to the Restoration, challenging English colonial representations of the country as a cultural vacuum. Ireland has excited a great deal of interest among Renaissance scholars over the past two decades, ever since Stephen Greenblatt's decisive intervention on Edmund Spenser and Ireland in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), an essay which drew on important work by Irish historians such as Brendan Bradshaw, Ciaran Brady, Nicholas Canny, and D. B. Quinn. A constant complaint from historians of early modern Ireland, and from those engaged in re? search on Irish language and literature in the period, has been that the preoccupation with English literary representations of Ireland and the Irish implies that England had a culture which it wished to impose on a country without one. This goes against the grain of Spenser's own perspective, since he argued in^4 View ofthe Present State of Ireland (1596) that the Irish had letters before the English, that the work of Irish poets was worthy of attention (and translation), and that itwas but the other day since England grew civil. In other words, one of the earliest and most canonical of English 178 Reviews colonists and commentators was prepared to concede that Ireland had a rich literary culture that pre-dated that of England. Yet the image ofthe 'wild Irish' promulgated by other planters has persisted. These two major new works offerample evidence of Ireland's complex cultural context from the seventh to the seventeenth century. The critical volume...

A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast: Annotation to Interpretation (review)

BOOK REVIEWS · 155 A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast: Annotation to Interpretation. By Gerry Brenner. 2 vols. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. 823 pp + xxi. Cloth $119.95. To grasp the import of Gerry Brenner's two-volume A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast: Annotation to Interpretation, one needs to place it briefly within the broad context of the field of hermeneutics. Originating in German biblical exegesis in the 19th century, and shaping up most extensively as a philosophy of interpretation in the works of Hans Georg Gadamar in the 20th century, hermeneutics has consistently privileged the interpretive enterprise over other textual approaches . That is so because hermeneutics takes the Bible as its original text and, like the closely related field of homiletics, has an evolutionary interpretive horizon of considerable importance. Inspired by the attributive narratives ofthe Gospels, each designated as "according to," hermeneutics vasdy enriches biblical and, by extension, literary studies. Hermeneutics enables oral and scriptural discourses first to appropriate and then transcend theirboundaries bydiscovering their own inexhaustible surplus of meaning. What was once accepted as an inexorably literal discourse becomes open-ended in unlimited sequences ofinterpretive activities. The uniquely privileged position accorded to hermeneutics in our time is justified by an array of indispensable prior studies falling into two broad categories. The first includes all of the fields in which structural analysis plays a crucial role: phonology, lexicology, lexicography, morphology, grammar, syntactics, semantics, rhetoric, and discourse analysis; as well as bibliographies, glossaries, annotations, encyclopedias, and the like. The second category comprises the more synthetic practices of clarification, explication, classification (genre studies), evaluation (criticism and aesthetics ), and interpretation. These synthetic practices draw closely upon the analytic ones as unavoidable prerequisites. Together, they make up many of the exigent, rigorous modes of study that academic and nonacademic scholars and critics undertake. Placed within the preceding synopsis of hermeneutics, Brenner's extensive and sustained work on A Moveable Feast offers a clear example of mil MfMiNCiWAY RiviLW, voi. 21. no. 2. SPRING 2002. Copyright T 2002 The Ernest 1 lemingway Foundation. Published by the University of Idaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. 156 · THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW well-integrated literary analysis and synthesis. A self-reflexive work, it discloses at once the often repressed but always inevitable connective tissue between interpretive and pre-interpretive literary studies. The descriptive subtitle of Brenner's study, "Annotation to Interpretation" makes manifest the nature and trajectory of his textual analysis of A Moveable Feast and the concentric interpretive circles it subsequently generates. On the one hand, Brenner's annotative work provides detailed factual information on "people, places, terms, events, ambiguities, and allusions to the text that the readers might not recognize or understand or, as with allusions, might misunderstand..." in A Moveable Feast (v). On the other hand, his interpretations apply specific modes of Freudian and textual analysis to A Moveable Feast, that is to say, to the extent that one might read it, either sequentially or simultaneously, as a "memoir," a "case study," or a "quasi-fiction." Read as "memoir," Brenner argues, A Moveable Feast will lead to "subtexts latent in the manifest content," divulging its dreamlike quality and its therapeutic value for the writer (x). Read as "case study," the text will reveal "Hemingway's injustices to fellow artists silenced by death" (x). Finally, read as "quasi-fiction," the text will divulge "irregularities and discontinuities that continually destabilize its narrative integrity, at times so abruptly blurring allegedly factual episodes that they take on the life of fictive vignettes" (xii). On yet another plane of literary discourse, the various textual "discontinuities " and self-reflexive qualities of A Moveable Feast render it a quasipostmodern text. A Moveable Feast carries traces of the postmodern concept of the world as text, regarding experience as textualized reality and every mode ofinterpretation as a linguistic construct. These discontinuities occur in A Moveable Feast either as the absence or seemingly incomprehensible presence of aesthetically dissonant narrative elements. For Brenner, such textual discontinuities and dissonances mark sites where certain unconscious motivations are at work in Hemingway that may surface and be made conscious by the intervention of the psychoanalytic critic. This work of analysis draws legitimacy...

Gelukkig hij die uw kinderen zal grijpen'

Happy is he who seizes your infants…. Hermeneutical and biblical-theological positioning of the Old Testament imprecations The Old Testament contains many prayers for the shaming, punishment or destruction of the godless, especially in the Psalms. This imprecatory prayer, which still forms one of the most troublesome dimensions of Scripture for modern Bible-readers, is usually explained very negatively as a human but intolerable expression of personal or national rancour/hostility, and as such put in sharp contrast with the New Testament message of love for the enemy. This article makes a plea for a more hermeneutically responsible exegesis, by paying attention to the background, context and intention of the imprecatory prayer itself. After having delineated the indigenous horizon of interpretation of the Old Testament imprecatory prayers, a comparison with New Testament data is made, leading to the conclusion that on the one hand the condemnation of Old Testament imprecatory prayer from the perspective of New Testament ethics is incorrect, but on the other that it is also impossible within the New Testament situation to raise the imprecatory prayer in the same manner as was done by the psalmists of the Old Testament. (Acta Theologica: 2002 22(1): 117-134)

Derrida and the promise of community

This paper offers a critique of Derrida's deconstruction of the promise on the grounds that it does not adequately account for the ethical constitution of the promise in the pragmatic context of face-to-face dialogue. Instead, Derrida focuses on the way in which the promise opens the horizon of interpretation or readability for an indefinite community of readers. Derrida's view is explicated at length, drawing on Limited Inc, Le monolinguisme de l’autre: ou, la prosthèse d’origine, and ‘Avances’, the Preface to Serge Margel's Le tombeau du dieu artisan. Paul Ricoeur's interpretation of the promise as an attestation of my availability to the other person is presented as a more justifiable grounding of ethics.

"One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul": Renaissance Friendship and Miltonic Marriage

Previous articleNext article No AccessMiltonic Revisions"One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul": Renaissance Friendship and Miltonic MarriageGregory ChaplinGregory Chaplin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 99, Number 2Nov., 2001 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493064 Views: 12Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 2001 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Gregory Chaplin The End of Friendship, (Jan 2019): 253–270.https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108303828.016 Consolidated Bibliography, (Jan 2016): 602–640.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118827833.biblioBlaine Greteman Milton and the Early Modern Social Network: The Case of the Epitaphium Damonis, Milton Quarterly 49, no.22 (May 2015): 79–95.https://doi.org/10.1111/milt.12126Erin Murphy, Catharine Gray Introduction, (Jan 2014): 1–25.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383105_1CEDRIC C. BROWN John Milton and Charles Diodati: Reading the Textual Exchanges of Friends, Milton Quarterly 45, no.22 (May 2011): 73–94.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1094-348X.2011.00276.xRaymond N. MacKenzie Rethinking Rhyme, Signifying Friendship: Milton’s Lycidas and Epitaphium Damonis MacKenzie, Modern Philology 106, no.33 (Jul 2015): 530–554.https://doi.org/10.1086/605075

What Does the Right to Education Mean? A Look at an International Debate from Legal, Ethical, and Pedagogical Points of View

Working from a concept of politics of education that encompasses legal,ethical and pedagogical levels of analysis, this paper presents theresults of a field work project on the meaning and current state of theright to education with a larger philosophical discourse. Talk ofeducation as a human right presupposes taking part in a horizon ofinterpretation. Projected is a view of person as a subject, i.e., assomeone not only placed in a specific context, but also as someone whois capable of distancing him/herself from local and culturalconditioning.

Between ‘Objectivism’ and ‘Contextualism': the Normative Foundations of Social Philosophy

One of the principal challenges facing contemporary social philosophy is how to find foundations that are normatively robust yet congruent with its self-understanding. Social philosophy is a critical project within modernity, an interpretative horizon that stresses the influences of history and context on knowledge and experience. However, if it is to engage in intercultural dialogue and normatively robust social critique, social philosophy requires non-arbitrary, universal normative standards. The task of normative foundations can thus be formulated in terms of negotiating the tension between ‘contextualism’ and ‘objectivism’. Six contemporary responses to this challenge are examined. Their respective limitations call for renewed reflection on justificatory strategies, in particular for a conception of ‘objectivity’ based in a normative theory of social learning processes.

Commentary: The Dose Effect in Children's Mental Health Services

Hans-Georg Gadamer, a German philosopher writing about the science of interpretation, points out that misunderstanding arises naturally ( Gadamer, 1975 Gadamer HG Truth and Method. Oxford University Press, New York1975 Google Scholar ). What he means by this is that the interpretation of or meaning attached to any piece of language-whether it is a law, a sermon, or a scientific “fact”-is bound by interpretive horizons that are historically and contextually situated. Understanding is achieved only when interpretive horizons can be merged. So while it is often assumed that misunderstanding is an aberration and understanding a normative condition, Gadamer suggests just the opposite.

‘Whose colour was no black nor white nor grey, But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may’: Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios

While painting Massacres of Chios in 1824, Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal that ‘The mulatto will do very well.’ This paper asks why a ‘mixed‐blood’ would figure in a picture painted on behalf of the Greek War of Independence and argues that Chios must be understood as material evidence of the history of France's imperial aspirations, as a vestige of its confusions as well as its experiments. To broaden the geopolitical horizon of interpretation of Chios is to appreciate the extent to which global politics were performed and remembered in the studio space of an ambitious, insecure and sexually preoccupied young French male painter.

"Jy is net 'n sandkorrel, maar só is alle mense" - Nadenke oor Psalm 131

"You are only a grain of sand, but so are all people" - Reflections on Psalm 131: W S Prinsloo has convincingly proved that humbleness and surety is what Psalm 131 is all about. His "text-immanent" approach allowed him to have an excellent grasp of this text and all texts that he studies. Utilising a newcomer on the methodological scene, namely Robbins' socio-rhetorical analysis, it is remarkable how Prinsloo's insights into PsaLm 131 could be used as basis for the "widening of interpretive horizons" on this psalm.