The Decline

For undergraduates, perhaps this passage describes the goal of academic writing, but I am surprised that a respected scholar would write so lazily about hermeneutics. But when, for example, I turn to Sir David Ross's magnificent commentary on Aristotle's Physics I do not do so in order to cover what the learned Sir David thought -- I do so in order to cover what Aristotle thought[…] But I am not in a sense, reading Y: Y is transparent, and I read Aristotle through him. I suspect that the author Jonathan Barnes, in the introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle , does not mean to say that an interpreter of a text can achieve the goal of transparency, only that transparency is the goal. But it is a bit disingenuous for the editor of an introductory book of essays to suggest to his novice audience that the contents therein might be taken uncritically as the word of Aristotle himself. It is even more disingenuous after explicitly noting the many necessary omissions and, ...

Il faut être absolument moderne. - Rimbaud , Un Saison en Enfer Long Sunday has dusted itself off for a series of essays on Axel Honneth 's new collection of essays : Pathologies of Reason . Unfortunately, I have not read the book. But many of the essays have been published previously in English, collected now under the rubric of the "legacy of Critical Theory." What I intend to do here is not to review the book, but to reflect on a few issues illustrated by the symposium at Long Sunday. I comment at considerable distance from the text itself: a response to responses at Long Sunday to an edited volume of essays translated from German. What Honneth really says is thus not an issue for me. This fact however points our attention towards a truism: that 'Critical Theory'—here more narrowly construed than in Craig McFarlane 's contribution—is a discourse sustained by readers and commenters. There is not only a set of primary texts that form the foundatio...