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Judgment and Action: Fragments Toward a History
Contributor(s): Soni, Vivasvan (Editor), Pfau, Thomas (Editor), Reydams-Schils, Gretchen (Contribution by)
ISBN: 0810136317     ISBN-13: 9780810136311
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
OUR PRICE:   $39.55  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: December 2017
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Comparative Literature
- Psychology | Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
Dewey: 153.46
LCCN: 2017036636
Physical Information: 0.8" H x 5.9" W x 8.9" (1.00 lbs) 344 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Written by theologians, literary scholars, political theorists, classicists, and philosophers, the essays in Judgment and Action address the growing sense that certain key concepts in humanistic scholarship have become suspect, if not downright unintelligible, amid the current plethora of critical methods. These essays aim to reassert the normative force of judgment and action, two concepts at the very core of literary analysis, systematic theology, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and other disciplines.

Interpretation is essential to every humanistic discipline, and every interpretation is an act of judgment. Yet the work of interpretation and judgment has been called into question by contemporary methods in the humanities, which incline either toward contextual determination of meaning or toward the suspension of judgment altogether. Action is closely related to judgment and interpretation and like them, it has been rendered questionable. An action is not simply the performance of a deed but requires the deed's intelligibility, which can be secured only through interpretation and judgment.

Organized into four broad themes--interiority/contemplation, ethics, politics/community, and aesthetics/image--the aim of this broad-ranging and insightful collection is to illuminate the histories of judgment and action, identify critical sites from which rethinking them may begin, clarify how they came to be challenged, and relocate them within a broader intellectual-historical trajectory that renders them intelligible.