Lexington Books
Pages: 162
•
Trim: 6 1/4 x 9 3/8
978-0-7391-8738-8 • Hardback • April 2014 • $92.00 • (£65.00)
978-0-7391-8739-5 • eBook • April 2014 • $87.00 • (£60.00)
J. R. Hustwit is assistant professor and chair of the Religion and Philosophy Department at Methodist University.
Chapter 1: Reclaiming the Religions
A Plea for Content
A Plea for Contention
The Hermeneutical Straddle
Chapter 2: Mixed Transmission: Three Core Insights of Hermeneutics
Hybrid Experience
Communal Stability
Epistemic Alienation
Chapter 3: Agents of Comprehension
What is Dialogue?
What is Understanding?
Agency and critical Reason
Chapter 4: The Worry of Incommensurability
The Gammar of a Life
Three Orders of Difference
Phronēsis: A Solution Based in Contingency
From Genuine Commensuration to Genuine Controversy
Chapter 5: Truth Beyond the Pale
Mysteriosophy
Internalism
Critical Realism
Reticent Realism
Fear of Ontological Commitment
Chapter 6: Reconstructing Plurality
Hermeneutics as Meta-narrative
The Disruption of Différance
The Logical Status of Fallibilist Hermeneutics
A Way Forward: Constructive Postmodernism
Dialogue and Homogeneity
The Hermeneutic Response to Deconstruction
Conclusion: Reality, Religions, and Discursive Justice
Surely, when we believe something, we believe it to be true, yet the truth claims of religion are in crisis today. In Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth, Jeremy Hustwit deftly charts a path between those who wish to dispense with truth altogether and those who are all too sure that they alone possess the final truth. Neither too skeptical nor too restrictive, Hustwitt offers a powerful platform for the new multi-faith dialogue. After all, how can the religions engage one another if they cannot even acknowledge where their beliefs differ?
— Philip Clayton, Ingraham Professor of Theology, Claremont School of Theology, Author of In Quest of Freedom: The Emergence of Spirit in the Natural World
In Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth, J. R. Hustwit proves to be a trustworthy guide to the tangled landscape of religious pluralism with its hermeneutical deadends and epistemological bogs. His well-argued endorsement of a faillibilist hermeneutics in conjunction with a commonsense understanding of truth is sorely needed byinterpreters of apparent conflict among religious beliefs. Hustwit leaves us not with a solution to the problem of religious pluralism, but with a meaningful, constructive, critical way forward.
— Wesley J. Wildman, Boston University
Hustwit takes us through a history of hermeneutic philosophy that is truly a tour de force. Impeccable and insightful discussions of [philosophers] . . . are just a few of the choicest highlights. . . .The book is as refreshing as it is rewarding. . . .for those who want not merely to rehash what others have already had to say about the relationship between hermeneutics and philosophy, but for those who actually want to do some thinking of their own by putting those results to work. . . .Hustwit gets us thinking, and that, especially in a context as sometimes fraught with posturing and hand-waving as this, is no small thing.
— Review of Metaphysics
J. R. Hustwit offers a perfectly pitched articulation and defense of a “reticent” realistic hermeneutical method that facilitates interreligious dialogue. Beyond seeking to understand commonalities and differences, he urges interfaith dialogue to engage truth questions. His review of European hermeneutics from Kant to the present is detailed and profound without being tortured. This is the best presentation of the Claremont Process School of hermeneutics to date, bringing its promotion of “constructive” (as opposed to “deconstructive”) postmodernism into clear conversation with the larger hermeneutical discussion. What a delight it is to find philosophical hermeneutics from the hands of someone who actually knows a lot about many religions!
— Robert Cummings Neville, professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology, Boston University and author of Realism in Religion and Religion in Late Modern