TIHS with David Weinstein: "Between Cambridge and Marburg"

Cambridge School contextualism is philosophical analysis turned against its historical myopia.  Philosophical analysis has had many children.  One of these is Cambridge School contextualism.  The German hermeneutical tradition seems to have little influenced Cambridge School intellectual historians like Skinner and Pocock, but their respective methods converge sufficiently, making it odd that Skinner and Pocock never had much to say about Gadamer in particular.  It is equally odd that Gadamer never had much use for them either.  As we will see, both Skinner and Gadamer sometimes invoke Collingwood.  Neither Skinner and Pocock on the one hand nor Gadamer on the other hand seem to have noticed how Collingwood influenced and inspired them all.  Their failure to notice their shared debts to Collingwood was a missed opportunity for what could have been intriguing methodological colloquy between them.  The last one hundred years of philosophical hermeneutics has kept repeating missed opportunities because of all kinds of methodological prejudices and suspicions.   

Bio:

I received a PhD from The Johns Hopkins University in 1988 and am Professor Emeritus, Wake Forest University, USA; Honorarprofessor, Carl von Ossietsky Universität Oldenburg, Germany and faculty member of the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar, USA. I was Lady Davis Fellow, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (2022) and will return again in this capacity in 2024 . I was a Plumer Research Fellow, St. Anne’s College, Oxford University (2014); the John Stuart Mill Visiting Chair of Social Philosophy, Universität Hamburg, Germany (2013-14) and Fulbright Fellow, Simon Dubnow-Institut, Universität Leipzig, Germany (2009). I have also held other visiting fellowships and scholarships at Oxford University and Tulane University. I published Equal Freedom and Utility (1998) and Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism (2007), both with the Ideas in Context series, Cambridge University Press. I am co-editor with A. Simhony of The New Liberalism also with Cambridge University Press (2001) as well as co-editor with B. Eggleston and D. Miller of John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life, Oxford University Press (2010). Jewish Exiles and European Thought in the Shadow of the Third Reich, co-authored with Avihu Zakai, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2017. I have been the book review editor for Utilitas since 2006 and have recently finishing a long manuscript tentatively titled Classical Utilitarianism and the Anxiety of Influence.