The role of Christian worship and devotional practices in making the gospels come alive in ever-changing historical circumstances and across ecclesial traditions is explored. Among the arts, attention is paid to the signal contribution of music (J. S. Bach, Black gospel music, and hymns) to the appreciation and appropriation of gospel texts.

While noting John’s several differences from the synoptics, Christopher Skinner shows how John is particularly interested in narrating the life of Jesus within the eternal life of God. It is Jesus’ unique relationship with God which shapes John’s distinctive portrayal of Jesus as the one through whom the hidden God is known.

This chapter describes Gadamer’s initial understanding of the nature and significance of Platonic philosophy in terms of dialogue and dialectic. It then provides a brief account of Gadamer’s own interpretive method as presented in Truth and Method. The chapter then shows how Gadamer changed his understanding of Plato, particularly in relation to Aristotle. The chapter shows how this new understanding of Plato provides the ontological foundation for Gadamer’s own “hermeneutics.” Finally, we see how Gadamer’s readings of ancient philosophers constitute a fundamental challenge and correction to the mode of interpretation still dominant in Anglo-American philosophy.

In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method ( Wahrheit und Methode). Although he had authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, “Philosophical Hermeneutics.” The publisher responded that “hermeneutics” was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed “Truth and Method” for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made “hermeneutics” and Gadamer’s name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in an attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language.

The origins, social function, and the legitimacy of law were life-long preoccupations for Judith Shklar. She was one of the first political philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition after World War II to devote intense attention to the role of law in liberal-democratic societies. In this respect, her work is more in line with European thinkers such as Max Weber, Franz Neumann and Harold Laski, and, of course, her adviser, Carl Friedrich, who was the first to recommend to her that she consider the topic of legalism.

Is there an “international rule of law movement”? Undoubtedly there exists a network of international bodies claiming to “work on” what are often called rule of law “issues,” many of whom use this term and do so self-referentially.2 These groups are not concerned with an “international rule of law,” whatever that might be, or indeed with international law more broadly. They are “international” in the sense that they comprise cross-border networks, and in that they approach the “rule of law” in a quasi-constitutional sense, abstracted from any specific (national) polity.

What is the rule of law, and under what conditions does it become a self-reinforcing, stable order? Missing from the various literatures that have attempted an answer is a coherent attempt to create a satisfying account of the microfoundations of the behaviors that generate and sustain a distinctively legal order. Whether philosophical or applied, existing approaches to the rule of law have neglected the question of what, exactly, is distinct about law’s rule. We do not yet know enough about what sets legal ordering apart from other strategies of ordering, be they economic, political, or violent.1 This chapter responds to this lacuna. In so doing it gives an account of the kinds of things required for a positive theory of the rule of law.

With the publication of his lectures on constitutional law in 1885, A. V. Dicey introduced an account of the rule of law that would have, for better or worse, a powerful influence. His book, Law of the Constitution, is an extended essay on how the law of the English or British constitution is the expression of two basic principles, the rule of law and parliamentary sovereignty. These ideas were not new to English legal writing, but Dicey succeeded with impressive literary flourish to elevate them to the status of the organizing principles of the constitution.

As composite polities, empires were plural legal orders. Conquest, settlement, and rule depended on elaborate arrangements to manage the relation of imperial law to local or indigenous law. Calls for impartial justice in empires emerged in the context of intricate legal conflicts over order and rights, with varied institutional trajectories as the result. The rule of law in empires must be approached as part of the history of legal politics in fluid, fragmented systems of law.

This chapter considers the criticisms of Gadamer’s hermeneutics that have recently been put forward by Michael Forster and Kristin Gjesdal. They find that Gadamer errs in rejecting the philosophy of interpretation that is put forward in the nineteenth century by Herder, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey. For these critics of Gadamer, the merit of these predecessors of Gadamer is their commitment to a methodical interpretive practice. Forster criticizes Gadamer for rejecting the attempt to recover distinct original meanings in the texts that one is considering. They find Gadamer’s hermeneutics to be relativistic. This chapter defends Gadamer against these charges.

The view of international law as a profession committed to the spread of liberal ideas emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century.1 One of those ideas was the rule of law. Attempts to realize a global rule of law and attempts to constitute an international community have long been linked. For many international lawyers, this gave international law a sense of forward movement and a clear telos, with the caveat that the reality of unequal power relations meant that international law could never be measured directly against a model borrowed from domestic law and politics.

Given the connection of “law and order” politics with conservatism, the idea of a conservative critique of the Rechtsstaat at first seems contradictory. After all, wasn’t John Adams’s insistence on defending the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre used as evidence for his conservatism? Didn’t Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution revolve around the preservation of law as part of a concrete order? But law and order are not identical and it is in the tension between the rule of law and the well ordered society that the possibility for conservative critique of the Rechtsstaat lies. In a time of revolutionary upheaval, furthermore, when revolutionaries proclaim the law, the legal side of “law and order” can come under fire as well.

To speak of “the rule of law” in many of the Muslim countries of the world at present may seem, not only to Westerners but to many citizens of the Islamic world, at best hypocritical and at worst a cruel joke. How, after all, can one speak of the rule of law when a woman may be killed for a marriage not approved by her father or brother, when a constitution can be changed at the whim of a ruler, or when corruption is so pervasive as to leave much of the citizenry feeling dirtied and disaffected? And yet the rule of law remains more than an ideal, more than a vague concept, and more than a useless analytic concept employed only by academic lawyers. For if we try to understand the rule of law not as a universal concept but for what it means in the context of any particular cultural tradition and its system of law, it may be possible to discern features that are not incompatible with the sense in which this phrase is commonly employed.

Herodotus’ Persian debate – a fictional conversation between three noble Persians on the relative merits of rule by one, rule by the few, and rule by all – ironically provides one of our clearest statements of Greek democratic theory.1 In the debate, Otanes, arguing for rule by all, highlights what are recognizable as the key features of Athenian democracy: isonomia (equality under the law); selection of magistrates by lot; accountability for officials; and decision-making in a deliberative popular Assembly.

Gadamer saw hermeneutics as heir to the tradition of Aristotelian practical philosophy. The exercise of phronesis, good practical judgment, helps sustain the solidarities upon which democracy depends. Phronesis is distinguished from techne, technical knowledge. Gadamer is critical of technocratic thinking. Phronesis is closely related to ethos. It has communal dimensions such that it invigorates the ethos of the society and makes possible solidarity. The basis for this is friendship. Friendship involves a life together of reciprocal co-perception.