Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience

How does philosophy relate to the Afro-American experience? This question arises primarily because of an antipathy to the ahistorical character of contemporary philosophy and the paucity of illuminating diachronic studies of the Afro-American experience. I will try to show that certain philosophical techniques, derived from a particular conception of philosophy, can contribute to our understanding of the Afro-American experience. For lack of a better name, I shall call the application of these techniques to this experience, Afro-American philosophy. I will examine historical sources of these techniques and explore the way in which they underscore the feasibility of an Afro-American philosophy. Finally, I will attempt to show what results such a philosophy should yield

Reassessing the Critical Legal Studies Movement

Like liberation theologians in seminaries, social medicine proponents in medical schools, radical deconstructionists in university literature departments, and opposition postmodern critics in the arts, critical legal theorists fundamentally question the dominant and usually liberal paradigms prevalent and pervasive in American culture and society. This thorough questioning is not primarily a constructive attempt to put forward a conception of a new legal and social order. Rather, it is a pronounced disclosure of the inconsistencies, incoherences, silences, and blindness of legal formalists, legal positivists, and legal realists in the liberal tradition. Critical legal studies is more a concerted attack and assault on the legitimacy and authority of pedagogical strategies in law schools than a comprehensive announcement of what a credible and realizable new society and legal system would look like

Critical Legal Studies and a Liberal Critic

The battle now raging in the legal academy between the Critical Legal Studies movement (CLS) and its critics has taken a decisive turn. Battles over decisions not to hire or give tenure to scholars associated with CLS have been front-page news in the academic community, and the tone of scholarly discussion has become decidedly negative. Much of the criticism has been aimed at one person often considered a guru to CLS, Roberto Unger. His work has inspired sharply negative commentary both here and abroad, and his most recent work, Politics, has received several scathing reviews

Review of Nicholas Rescher, Pascal's Wager: A Study of Practical Reasoning in Philosophical Theology

The immeasurable impact of Pascal is rarely appreciated or understood by contemporary thinkers. On the one hand, Pascal is lauded by literary critics for his writing style while his philosophical contributions are overlooked. On the other hand, Pascal is trivialized by analytic philosophers who view his wager argument as but a poor instance of decision theory. Nicholas Reseller's book is distinctive in that it takes Pascal seriously as a philosopher in light of past and present theological modes of argumentation. As a distinguished historian of pragmatic philosophy, Rescher understands Pascal to be the great innovator of the major philosophical trends of our day: the theological use of practical reason, the diversity of modes of rationality, and the focus on praxis in contemporary hermeneutics

On Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative

Hans Frei's fresh interpretation in Eclipse of Biblical Narrative demonstrates the specific ways in which forms of supernaturalism, historicism, classicism, moralism and positivism have imposed debilitating constraints on the emergence of modern hermeneutics. These constraints resulted in a discursive closure which prohibited the development of a perspective which viewed Biblical texts as literary texts depicting unique characters and personages. Instead, early modern hermeneutical discourse conceived such texts as manifestations of divine presence, sources for historical reconstruction, articulations of the inner existential anxieties of their authors, bases for moral imperatives or candidates for verifiable claims. In a painstaking and often persuasive manner, Frei examines the "precritical" (a self-serving adjective coined by modern hermeneutical thinkers) interpretive procedures of Luther and Calvin, the pietistic viewpoint represented by Johann Jacob Rambach, the rationalistic approach of Spinoza and the proto-heilsgeschichtliche outlook of Johannes Cocceius

A Matter of Life and Death

"What do we mean by 'identity'?" Since this term itself can be a rather elusive, amorphous, and even vaporous one, we need to have heuristic markings for it. The second is "What is the moral content of one's identities?"-because we all have multiple positions in terms of constructing our identities; there's no such thing as having one identity or of there being one essential identity that fundamentally defines who we actually are. And third, "What are the political consequences of our various identities?

The New Cultural Politics of Difference

In the last few years of the twentieth century, there is emerging a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists. In fact, I would go so far as to claim that a new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference. These new forms of intellectual consciousness advance new conceptions of the vocation of critic and artist, attempting to undermine the prevailing disciplinary divisions of labor in the academy, museum, mass media, and gallery networks while preserving modes of critique within the ubiquitous commodification of culture in the global village

The Prophetic Tradition in Afro-America

Prophetic modes of thought and action are dotted across the landscape of Afro-American history. I understand these modes to consist of protracted and principled struggles against forms of personal despair, intellectual dogmatism and socioeconomic oppression that foster communities of hope. Therefore the distinctive features of prophetic activity are Pascalian leaps of faith in the capacity of human beings to transform their circumstances, engage in relentless criticism and self-criticism and project visions, analyses and practices of social freedom. In this essay, I shall attempt to characterize and criticize—hence try to reactivate—the prophetic tradition in Afro-America

The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual

The contemporary black intellectual faces a grim predicament. Caught between an insolent American society and an insouciant black community, the African American who takes seriously the life of the mind inhabits an isolated and insulated world. This condition has little to do with the motives and intentions of black intellectuals; rather it is an objective situation created by circumstances not of their own choosing. In this meditative essay, I will explore this dilemma of the black intellectual and suggest various ways of understanding and transforming it

John P. Gunnemann, The Moral Meaning of Revolution

This book's basic aim is "to clarify the relationship between revolutionary practice and moral reasoning" (p. 2). This aim primarily involves presenting a complex argument to show that revolution cannot be justified in the usual sense of what it means to justify an act precisely because the ordinary moral courts of appeal are called into question by revolutionaries. This is so because, for Gunnemann, revolution is, fundamentally, a rejection of an existing understanding of the problem of evil and an attempt to put forward a new solution to the problem of evil. Following the pioneering work of Thomas Kuhn in philosophy of science, Gunnemann holds that ordinary moral courts of appeal are rejected by revolutionaries because such courts of appeal "imply residual confidence in the existing theodicy and the revolutionary loses his case merely by submitting to such a process" (p. 43). Hence, revolution is better understood as an apocalyptic event or as a religious conversion than as a moral act. For Gunnemann, conflicting paradigm solutions to the problem of evil—defined by Max Weber as the incongruity between destiny and merit—are at the heart of the moral meaning of revolution