Politics and International Relations

'The Politics of Interpretation & The Interpretation of Politics'

Recorded: 2011/09/23 - 2011/09/24

This series of podcasts is taken from an interdisciplinary conference convened by Jens Olesen, held on 23 and 24 September 2011 in Seminar room A, Manor Road Building.

"Within the last fifty years, interpretation has become one of the most important intellectual paradigms of humanities and social sciences scholarship. Theories about law and literature, philosophy and political thought, history and theology all rely on textual interpretation. Issues such as the role of intentions in the interpretation of texts, the question of whether texts determine, or constrain, interpretations of them, and how much, if any, contextual information is required for their understanding, concern all those disciplines, and call for cross-disciplinary collaboration and exchange. Finally, the simultaneous proliferation of certain interpretive approaches such as ‘hermeneutics’, ‘deconstruction’, and ‘feminist (re)readings’ of texts across disciplinary divides has shown the permeability of these boundaries, and has thus made this call for collaboration even more pertinent.

This conference provided a setting in which distinguished proponents and critics of some of the prevalent interpretive approaches currently used in humanities and social sciences research were able to engage, for the first time, in a rigorous debate about the advantages and costs of each approach, and to discuss the political assumptions that inform them, as well as aims that drive them."

The conference organiser is most grateful for the support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Department of Politics and International Relations, the Centre for Political Ideologies, the Mind Association, and Princeton University Press.

(Please note that Question & Answer sessions have not been included.)

'Ideology Between Method and Meaning: The Gateway to the Political'

Listen online:

Download Here (49.41MB)

Chair: Jens Olesen (Oxford)

10:00 – 11:00 Welcome and Introduction
Professor Michael Freeden (Oxford) Ideology Between Method and Meaning: The Gateway to the Political

'Hermeneutics'

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Download Here (124.74MB)

(Chair: Dr Reidar Maliks, Oxford)

Dr Carsten Dutt (Heidelberg): On the Very Concept of Interpretation
Professor Dieter Teichert (Konstanz/Lucerne): Hermeneutics: the Political, Politics, and Political Science
Professor Jean Grondin (Montréal): Are There Political Consequences of Hermeneutics? Impromptus on the Modest Political Competence of Philosophy
Professor Paul H. Fry (Yale): Gadamer vs. Hirsch—Are There Consequences?

'Contextualist Approaches'

Listen online:

Download Here (107.18MB)

(Chair: Professor Janet Coleman, LSE/NYU)

Professor Mark Bevir (Berkeley): The Contextual Approach: Then and Now
Professor John G. Gunnell (Albany/UC Davis): Challenging the Received View of Thought and Language: Wittgenstein on Intention, Interpretation, and Context
Dr Michael L. Frazer (Harvard): The Ethics of Interpretation in Political Theory and Intellectual History

'Feminist Interpretations'

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Download Here (94.96MB)

(Chair: Professor Lois McNay, Oxford)

Dr Elizabeth Frazer (Oxford): Feminism and Interpretivism Revisited
Professor Terrell Carver (Bristol): Feminist Curiosities and Gender Troubles: Power, Politics, Metaphor
Dr Pamela Anderson (Oxford): The Politics of Interpretation in French Feminist Philosophy

'Deconstruction'

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Download Here (80.2MB)

(Chair: Professor Mark Bevir, Berkeley)

Professor Joshua Foa Dienstag (UCLA): Interpretation, Language and Authority
Dr Lasse Thomassen (London): Aporia: The End of Politics?
Dr James Martel (San Francisco): Hobbes and Spinoza on the Hebrew Republic and the Deconstruction of Sovereignty

'Postgraduate Student and Early Career Panel'

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Download Here (86.96MB)

(Chair: Dr James Martel, San Francisco)

Jens Olesen (Oxford) On Derrida’s ‘Double Reading’ and the Politics of Deconstruction
Dr Charles Devellennes (Kent) Political Non-Methodology
JanaLee Cherneski (Oxford) Method and (Mis-)Application: Two Readings of Joseph Schumpeter
Dr Philipp von Wussow (Leipzig) Leo Strauss on ‘Cultural’ and ‘Political’ Writing

'Philosophy, Law & Interpretation'

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Download Here (66.37MB)

(Chair: Professor James Connelly, Hull)

Professor Al P. Martinich (Texas): Ideal Interpretation of Political Texts
Professor Terence Ball (Arizona): Lincoln’s Hermeneutics

'Strauss and Esoteric Reading'

Listen online:

Download Here (60.15MB)

(Chair: Dr Michael L. Frazer, Harvard)

Professor David Weinstein (Wake Forest/Leipzig): Using and Abusing the Canon
Professor James Connelly (Hull): The Biter Bit, The Writer Writ: Some Straussian Ironies

Finally, Professor Stanley Rosen (Boston) delivered his talk on Strauss’s Hermeneutics via video:

 
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