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
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 researchwere 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.)
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 researchwere 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.)