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This chapter begins by reviewing the question-oriented account of historical understanding of explaining scenes of inquiry, local reality, and interpretation. It follows with an argument of an account that avoids the most blatant forms of hermeneutic circularity, unlike related question-oriented accounts. It then discusses the main topic, the relation between the explication of historical understanding and the craft of historical interpretation. In particular, it examines the validity of two additional criteria of adequacy of interpretation: faithfulness to authorial intention and imputation of consistency. It argues that the theoretical account pointed out in this chapter entails definite stances on these issues, and that these stances are in good accord with common sense and sound historical practice. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the prospects for extension of this account from the history of philosophy and the sciences to the history of writings in general.

Chapter 1 gives an explication of the abandonment—a description of the abandonment, in other words, in terms that can be plausibly ascribed to Marie herself. Over time, Marie’s doubts about whether the abandonment had been divinely inspired give way to a certitude that it had, such that Marie comes to represent the abandonment unambiguously in the familiar idiom of Christian sacrifice performed in submission to the will of God. This chapter argues, taking its cue from the work of Paul Ricoeur, that within the context of the Relation of 1654 and Marie’s later letters to Claude, the abandonment takes its place as an inevitable and necessary episode in a story of spiritual progress, healing the rift in a personal narrative that threatens to fracture under the twin pressures of mysticism and maternity.

This chapter shows how Carnap's conception of the proper goals and methods of philosophy can be used to support a pragmatist critique of some current tendencies in the philosophy of science. Carnap takes an important project of scientific philosophy to be the construction of systems of exact concepts that can better serve the purposes toward which older, vaguer, more confused forms of language have been directed. The author believes that Carnap's advice is worth taking seriously both in contemporary general philosophy of science and in current philosophy of biology. He uses Carnap's ideas about explication as a perspective from which to examine some discussions in which philosophers of biology have recently engaged.

This chapter proposes an empirical explication of the notion of ‘causation’, which the chapter calls a generalized explication of ‘causation’ (GEC), based on the numerical balance between instantiations of extensive quantities. In this way, the chapter shows that both the conserved and the non‐conserved quantities have a role. It follows that the Salmon–Dowe approach should be considered valid only in particular cases.

This chapter addresses a case of sexual misconduct that occurred in the workplace. This case involved Candie and her primary care physician, Dr. Mark Berger, who apparently asked for sexual favors after Candie asked him to refer her to a neurologist that he knew. Due to the small amount of data available—Candie presented two recordings of her thirty-minute meetings with Dr. Berger—the author used close reading, or explication de text, in order to analyze these conversations. These conversations demonstrate classic examples of verbal dueling, which usually occurs between two people who have separate agendas, and the safe haven conversational strategy, where a person returns to his/her safe haven topics whenever it becomes obvious that he/she is unable to get the other person to agree to his/her agenda.

This chapter addresses the question of how Gilles Deleuze adopts the standpoint of immanence. Deleuze agrees with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's own praise of Baruch Spinoza, and the privileged position which he occupies in the history of philosophy. He also precisely considers Spinoza as a way out of Hegel and the false movement of dialectic. His concern with immanence is closely wrapped up with his reading of Spinoza. The connection between immanence and emanation is demonstrated. Thought and Extension both express the essence of substance, but determine that essence into different forms. Immanence represents the unity of complication and explication, of inherence and implication. It is noted that Deleuze's two doctoral theses, namely Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, complement one another. In Difference and Repetition, expression becomes differenciation.

this chapter is concerned with the classification of laws according to how they are made. This is already a philosophically partisan enterprise. Some laws, say some people, are not made at all. They are not artefacts. They have no agent(s) who serve as their originator or creator or author. By demystifying some of the intriguing ways in which laws are made, the chapter hopes to remove some of the appeal of this view. The first three sections consider, respectively, legislated law, customary law, and case law. In the fourth section the chapter discusses common law: How does it fit in? The final section concludes that all the types of law discussed here are types of positive law. There is, it suggests, no other type of law but positive law, i.e. law that is made.

Contrary to a long history of scholarship that considers Sitwell’s personality a major detriment to her historical and contemporary reception, this chapter understands Sitwell’s self-marketing strategy as genius critical self-doubling. To this end, Sitwell’s most important genre is criticism, in which she displays a penchant for often unattributed self-reference and self-explication. Sitwell doubles herself in her criticism, forging an arbitrary division between Sitwell the empirical critic and Sitwell the poet-philosopher; the empirical critic functions as a stand-in for the critico-literary institution, providing an “external” imprimatur for the poet-philosopher. Examining Noël Coward’s creation of Sitwell’s parodic poet-doppelgänger, Hernia Whittlebot, thus allows an understanding of Sitwell’s own self-doubling as integral to her self-marketing genius—Whittlebot’s relationship to Sitwell reenacts Sitwell’s approach to her own work. More broadly, these relations are a microcosm for the institution of modernist literary criticism that developed conterminously with the maturation and solidification of Sitwell’s strategies of authorship.

This chapter discusses Husserl's final years and how, although he no longer belongs to the University of Freiburg's roster of its academic personnel, he is now writing for an audience beyond the increasingly bleak and twisted world of Freiburg and Germany. He also has Fink to speak with about his work and the ideas that are still alive in it. Yet that they share a common frame in the program of phenomenology does not mean that they have a common assessment of what is to come next in that program's development. To Husserl the fundamentals of phenomenology compose a groundwork of ever-holding, ever-renewable insightfulness in rigorous fulfillment of the ideal of rational explication. For Fink, however, those same fundamentals are themselves deeply problematic.

Why has it been so hard to retain an accurate representation of the varied nature of critical practice through each generation? This chapter argues that Joseph Kuntz and George Arms’s 1950 Poetry Explication may provide an answer: it suggests that formalist close reading became dominant by rendering explications—rather than poems—as autonomous. By excerpting explications from their original print contexts, Kuntz and Arms’s bibliographic index excises the immediate considerations—historical, biographical, bibliographical—that extend from a critic’s turn to a poem. Shorn of such contexts, the many and varied ‘explications’ seem to approach an asymptotic ideal of what close reading is and does. Revealing that formalism’s rise required a curation of criticism, the index invites us to think about how scholarly tools that usher readers in and out of scholarly textual worlds had a role to play in the making of ‘close reading’.

An image has long haunted the study of American culture. It limits our thought, shapes our values. We speak of the “mainstream,” and we imply by that term the existence of other work, minor rills and branches. In prose, the writing of men like Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow—to name some of the central figures—constituted the “mainstream.” Others—writers of color, most women writers, “regional” or “ethnic” male and female authors—might, we said, be assimilated into the mainstream, though probably they would continue to constitute tributaries, interesting and often sparkling, but finally of less importance. They would, we tacitly assumed, be judged by the standards and aesthetic categories we had developed for the canonical writers. At best, we acknowledged that including in the canon writers like Wharton, Cather, Chopin, and Ellison might change somewhat our definition of the mainstream, but the intellectual model imposed by that mainstream image, this Great River theory of American letters, has persisted even among mildly revisionist critics. Such critics have continued to focus on a severely limited canon of “major” writers based on historical and aesthetic categories from this slightly augmented mainstream. The problem we face is that the model itself is fundamentally misleading. The United States is a heterogeneous society whose cultures, while they overlap in significant respects, also differ in critical ways. A normative model presents those variations from the mainstream as abnormal, deviant, lesser, perhaps ultimately unimportant. That kind of standard is no more helpful in the study of culture than is a model, in the study of gender differences, in which the male is considered the norm, or than are paradigms, in the study of minority or ethnic social organization and behavior based on Anglo-American society. What we need, rather, is to pose a comparativist model for the study of American literature. It is true that few branches of academe in the United States have been so self-consciously indifferent to comparative study as has been the field we call “American literature.”

This chapter discusses body part nouns, a part of language that is central to human life, and the polysemy that arises in connection with them. Examples from everyday speech and narrative in various contexts are examined in a Papuan language called Koromu and semantic characteristics of body part nouns in other studies are also considered. Semantic templates are developed for nouns that represent highly visible body parts: for example, wapi ‘hands/arms’, ehi ‘feet/legs’, and their related parts. Culture-specific explications are expressed in a natural metalanguage that can be translated into Koromu to avoid the cultural bias inherent in using other languages and to reveal both distinctive semantic components and similarities to cross-linguistic examples.

This chapter is largely an examination of the significance one of Frege’s views has for contemporary thought. The view, which was labeled the “apparently absurd view” in Chapter 6, is that (1) it is appropriate to give definitions of terms already in use that are, in part, stipulative and (2) it is appropriate to take sentences in which such terms appear as, already (pre-definition), having truth-values. It is argued that, although this view may seem absurd, it is perfectly in line with some scientific practices, in particular unexceptionable practices routinely used in epidemiology. If we follow Hilary Putnam’s view about the significance of our deference to experts, we should accept Frege’s apparently absurd view as not absurd in the least. Moreover, what we see on examination of this view are reasons for rejecting a number of contemporary views about vague language, including those of Field, Fine, Fodor and Lepore, and Williamson.

In this chapter, as in Chapter 7, an example is given that shows how Frege’s lessons can be put to work on contemporary issues. The focus here is on two papers, written by Paul Benacerraf in 1965 and 1973, that are still of concern to many philosophers today. In the first, Benacerraf argues that, although it seems obvious that numbers are objects, in fact numbers cannot be objects. In the second, Benacerraf presents an epistemological puzzle that seems to undermine our claims to have mathematical knowledge—even knowledge of elementary facts about numbers. These puzzles challenge our everyday understanding both of the nature of numbers and of our knowledge about them. In this chapter, it is argued that both puzzles depend on our presupposing the subsentential priority view. And both puzzles, it is argued, vanish once we accept Frege’s sentential priority view.