This is a lively, freshly invited collection of papers by a number of well-known philosophers and other specialists who have focused very pointedly on certain central conceptual puzzles posed by the general practice of interpretation in the arts, literature, history, and the natural and human sciences. The collection gives very nearly the impression of a sustained debate.
About the Author
John R. Shook is Vice President for Research and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry, and Research Associate in Philosophy at the University at Buffalo. He is author of Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, editor of Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism, and editor of the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers. He is also co-editor of the journal Contemporary Pragmatism.
Joseph Margolis is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. His recent books include The Flux of History and the Flux of Science, Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium, Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History, and Reinventing Pragmatism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century.
Features
Includes papers by a number of those currently most active in the philosophy of interpretation. Links specialized topics in one or another field of interpretation with the larger theoretical questions about the nature of interpretation.
Tries to bring together a theory of the nature of interpretable things and the nature of what makes their interpretation objective.
Features a number of the most baffling questions regarding valid, even incompatible, alternative interpretations.
