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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Responding To Nietzsche: The Constructive Power Of Destruktion, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Responding To Nietzsche: The Constructive Power Of Destruktion, Francis J. Mootz Iii
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As a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and later a translator and important commentator on Gadamer’s philosophy, P. Christopher Smith is widely acknowledged to be a leading hermeneutical philosopher. In a series of works, Smith has argued that Gadamer provides an important corrective to Nietzsche’s caustic critical challenges, but that Gadamer’s hermeneutics has no relevance for legal theory because law is just the manifestation of will to power. In this paper I argue that Smith misunderstands the nature of legal practice. Starting with a re-reading of the debate between Gadamer and Jacques Derrida about the legacy of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I argue …
Ricoeur’S Critical Hermeneutics And The Psychotherapeutic Model Of Critical Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Ricoeur’S Critical Hermeneutics And The Psychotherapeutic Model Of Critical Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii
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This paper seeks to extend Ricoeur’s acclaimed mediation of the Gadamer-Habermas debate. Freud’s psychoanalytic practice was an important touchstone for the debate, and Ricoeur’s reading of Freud provides a key to his critical intervention in the debate. The emerging postmodern account of psychotherapeutic practice provides a model of the critical hermeneutics that Ricoeur championed. Bringing Ricoeur’s insights to bear on this model, we can advance the questioning spurred by the Gadamer-Habermas debate without pretending to bring closure to the unending conversation of thinking.
The Quest To Reprogram Cultural Software: A Hermeneutical Response To Jack Balkin's Theory Of Ideology And Critique, Francis J. Mootz Iii
The Quest To Reprogram Cultural Software: A Hermeneutical Response To Jack Balkin's Theory Of Ideology And Critique, Francis J. Mootz Iii
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Critical theory has lost the self-assurance that defined the heady days of Marxist economics and Freudian psychoanalysis. In his famous debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer thirty years ago, Jürgen Habermas argued that critical theory was a necessary corrective to the quiescence and conventionalism that followed from Gadamer's hermeneutic perspective. As the 1960s unfolded, the second generation of the Frankfurt School appeared poised to bring sophisticated techniques of social criticism to bear on the emerging postindustrialist system of global capitalism. But the promise of critical theory failed to materialize. Today, Habermas plays the role of the aging lion who refuses to accept …
Foreward, Symposium: Philosophical Hermeneutics And Critical Legal Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Foreward, Symposium: Philosophical Hermeneutics And Critical Legal Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii
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This Symposium brings the considerable talents of a diverse group of scholars to bear on a pressing problem in legal theory: Whether critical theory is possible after the hermeneutical turn. All too often, this problem is framed to invite an “either-or” response. Either we reject the hermeneutical turn and hew to a traditional account of critique anchored by an unimpeachable standard (whether economic, historical, conceptual, cognitive, or otherwise), or we take the hermeneutical turn by embracing radical historical contingency and fluidity, thereby forsaking the possibility of critique and surrendering to conservative conventionalism or inviting postmodern chaos. This Symposium challenges this …