Gadamer’s attitude to Collingwood was marked by ambivalence: while promoting the Englishman on the one hand, Gadamer claimed on the other that the fundamental dimension of “hermeneutical mediation” had simply escaped him. In this paper, I aim both to assess Gadamer’s debt to Collingwood and the prima facie strength of his objections. First, I reconstruct steps by which ideas of Collingwood found their place in Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the 1950s, including the central “axiom of all hermeneutics”: the thesis that “we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer.” Second, I examine Gadamer’s main objections to Collingwood, the first one being based on a misunderstanding of Collingwood’s stance, while the second one hits home, and I argue in the final section that at issue here is Collingwood’s claim that it is possible to rethink exactly the same thought as that of, say, an historical agent, while Gadamer holds precisely the opposite view, that this is never possible.

Are robots a tool mindlessly following their programming, or an actor with agency? Are robots inevitable to the extent that we should just accept them, or does regulation have a role to play? And how do we understand our understanding, that is, how do we arrive at concepts to understand human–robot interaction that adequately incorporate different disciplines? These questions suggest that to understand robots and our place in the legal world with them, we must consider subject matter beyond substantive law and procedure. The narrative chapters in this Part of the book provide additional ways to identify the questions raised by human–robot interaction and propose how to begin answering them.

The reformist religious intellectuals of the 1990s and the 2000s sought to articulate a new jurisprudence that drew inspiration from dynamic, reason-centered ijtihad. The characteristics of the new, reconstituted fiqh were meant to include a comprehensive research program of reformism, deconstruction of commonplace understanding of religion and religion hermeneutic, and reexamining religious experiences and expectations. It was also meant to historicize religion and reimagine jurisprudence through the application of secular and scientific tools and methods. The project’s spectacular failure, slowly made clear about a decade after its zenith in the mid-2000s, owed much to the right’s merciless and multipronged onslaught. But that failure – more accurately, its violent obstruction – did not come until after the project of deconstructing hermeneutics and ijtihad had been taken to their logical extension, namely efforts to construct a sustained theory of Islamic democracy.

Far from being a purely speculative exercise, philosophy is important for practical purposes in our discipline, including conceptual clarification of disputed psychiatric terms, awareness of basic theoretical tenets underlying psychiatric classification and practice, acknowledgment and management of differences in values between clinicians and patients, facilitation of ethical choices, refinement of understanding, and sense-making of the patients’ peculiar way to express their own mental suffering. This chapter illustrates the role of phenomenological and hermeneutic clarification in order to shed light on the construction of mental symptoms. In particular, we consider the role of the patients’ “position-taking” regarding their abnormal mental experience in shaping the final form of their mental symptoms. We start from analyzing the difficulties encountered by descriptive psychopathology in the search of pathognomonic symptoms, showing that both apparent (e.g., hallucinations and delusions) and subtler phenomena (e.g., basic self-disturbances) are not specificand risk overdiagnosis or the use of too large and vague diagnostic concepts. A phenomenological and hermeneutic stance is useful to enhance the characterization of mental symptoms by taking into account subtle formal differences, the gestaltic dialectic between the phenomenon and its background, and the way patients take a position toward their personal abnormal experiences.

When Comparative Politics emerged in the early 1960s, drawing on functionalist theory, the concept of political culture featured prominently in how political development might be best studied. In the prevailing functionalist perspective, political culture was defined as the sum of the views, values, and attitudes people hold towards the political system. Over time, with the decline of functionalism and the rise of positivist theory, political culture was marginalized and reduced to data collected (e.g., in interview surveys). Drawing conclusions about national political cultures using such instruments, however, is problematic. Following influences from hermeneutics, the concept has since been reinvented with a focus on discourse and empowerment. This involves accepting the public sphere as the forum for political discourse, and a recognition of public opinion as a driving force in shaping and changing political culture. This chapter traces the evolution of the study of political culture in mainstream Comparative Politics. It emphasizes the role that political culture has been playing as explanatory variable in the study of both development and democratization. Western countries have viewed themselves as embarked on a mission to disseminate progressive values to the rest of the world, arguing in their approach to political culture in Africa that reforms are needed. Originally conceived as “traditional”, the initial calls were to make it “civic”. The same premise has underpinned more recent research on democratization. In placing research on African political culture in its wider Comparative Politics context, the chapter highlights why approaching it through Western eyes has its limits. More attention needs to be paid not only to the values that underpin political culture in Africa but also to the voice of African political scientists and their interpretation of the success and failure of democratization on the continent.

This chapter provides an accessible overview of the wide, diverse and ever-expanding field of classical reception studies. It begins with an overview of the word ‘reception’ and its origins in philosophical hermeneutics, and surveys a series of critiques that have been made of the word’s usefulness. Then the chapter makes three claims. First, allusions to antiquity have frequently occurred within a broader matrix of challenge and contestation, and so the critical analysis of classical reception should pay attention to voices that challenge the values accorded to classical literature, as well as those who embrace them. Second, a focus on the history of education can help us see classical allusion as a social challenge rather than simply a submission to prevailing literary or cultural norms. Third, the study of reception is at its most vital as a mode of communication outside classics, whether to the public, to students or to scholars in other fields. Ultimately, reception studies make up a vital part of the future of classical scholarship, and yet questions remain about whether the word ‘reception’ best communicates the subject’s intellectual range and ambition.

Chapter 1 reconstructs the conceptual history of tact as a social, ethical, and aesthetic category. Starting out with Voltaire’s 1769 definition that marks tact’s fundamental paradigm shift from a sense of feeling to a form of sociability, I reconstruct the word’s ensuing career as a key concept in 19th- and 20th-century pedagogical, philosophical, and literary discourse. I discuss tact’s history within the context of the demise of the ancien régime and the rise of the bourgeois subject, reflecting on a variety of different historical and philosophical explanations (Elias, Adorno, Foucault). I reconstruct how and why, around 1800, tact turns into a key philosophical term, depicting an intuitive form of empirical judgement (Kant). I show how, in the second half of the 19th century, tact, understood as an individual deviation from normative structures, came to occupy a key position in the method dispute between the humanities and the natural sciences (Helmholtz). I conclude by reflecting on how psychological tact went on to become a key category in modern and contemporary hermeneutics, uniting the otherwise antagonistic work of scholars incl. Adorno, Gadamer, Barthes, Felski, and Macé.

Existing theories of human interaction tend to focus on tact as a marker of social distinction (Sartre, Bourdieu), and a tool for the cementation of bourgeois power (Foucault). The introduction sets the arena for a new account of tact that not only considers tact’s discriminating effects but also, and primarily, gives room to its equalizing dynamic and democratic potential. Using a story from Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968) about a gentleman and a naked lady in a bathroom as an example to unpack some of the key aspects of tact, I engage in critical dialogue with a wide range of scholars from different disciplines (including Wollheim, Kohut, Coplan, Luhmann, Derrida, Goffman, Žižek, Sartre, and Sennett). The aim is to address the following questions: What is tact? What is the relation between empathy, widely associated with proximity, and tact as a generator of distance? How can we distinguish tact from politeness and what are the implications of this distinction? How does social tact, as the spontaneous and individual art of mitigating social encounter, relate to hermeneutical tact as a particular mode of reading faces, images, texts?

Chapter 2 looks at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in the context of the Belle Époque as an age characterised by the disintegration of existing hierarchies, norms, and conventions. I start out by considering the novel’s long-lost earliest drafts, Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, to then focus on close readings of a series of encounters between Marcel, Charlus, Albertine, and Andrée. Tact, Proust’s novel suggests, can be interpreted as an egalitarian force, indicating an equilibrium between the people involved. At the same time, it can also be seen as a creator of power imbalance, and a marker of social distinction. This conflict gives rise to a number of questions: Is tact a moral or an amoral category? Where do we draw the line between tact, hypocrisy, and lying? How do we deal with the uncertainty of interpretation as it begins to turn into one of the narrator’s most tantalizing concerns? Drawing on a variety of different theorists of tact (incl. Kant, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Sartre, Gadamer, Hall, Bourdieu, Goffman, Luhmann), I describe Proust’s tact as a paradoxical category that oscillates between autonomy and control, classification and declassification.

Chapter 5 engages with Barthes’s tact by situating it within a philosophical landscape that expands from the West (Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche) to the East (Kakuzō, Suzuki). In so doing, I reconstruct how Barthes explores the connection between human sociability and intellectual productivity in view of its hermeneutic potential. I show that Barthes’s alternative practice of critical inquiry bears striking resemblance to Adorno’s idea of hermeneutical tact. I argue that Barthes’s notion of tact, although unfashionable in the 1970s, is crucial to ongoing debates that challenge the hermeneutic of suspicion (Gadamer, Ricœur) and transgress the limits of critique (Felski). I also question, however, if the essentially democratic idea of a tactful hermeneutics first introduced by Kant truly translates into Barthes’s, Adorno’s and Gadamer’s theories. Tact, they jointly contend, cannot be taught. Unlike politeness, it must be lived. The elitism this idea implies, and its implicit vicinity to the Romantic idea of the genius, give rise to the suspicion that, while aiming to suspend any class-oriented conceptions of tact, in the end, this may be precisely what their theories help to reproduce.

This chapter pitches Arnold’s theory of how we should read against his reading practice. It uncovers how secular the practice of literary criticism really is. Arnold’s legacy, the idea of reading as moral formation, will remain confused as long as we neglect practice in favour of theory. Beginning with an overview of Arnold’s approach to reading the Bible in Literature and Dogma (1873), I explore how Arnold’s biblical hermeneutics works in practice, arguing that his preparation of a version of Isaiah for schoolchildren replaces established typological practice with a new method which he calls ‘employing parallels’. It is the genre and apparatus of the Bible ‘version’ which registers and enables his radical position. In Arnold’s method, the intellectus spiritualis is replaced by a secular method of imaginative engagement which has far-reaching consequences for how the reader finds themselves positioned: as a result, a secular intellectus culturae or cultural ‘tact’ comes to replace the traditional method of reading scripture. Throughout I am concerned with reading as a practice which is constitutive of concepts including faith and doubt.