Legitimate Differences challenges the usual portrayal of current debates over thorny social issues including abortion, pornography, affirmative action, and surrogate mothering as moral debates. How can it be said that our debates oppose principles of life to those of liberty, principles of liberty to those of equality, principles of equality to those of fairness, and principles of fairness to those of integrity, when we as Americans share all these principles?

Debates over such issues are not, Georgia Warnke argues, moral debates over which principles we should adopt....

Hans-Georg Gadamer is one of the leading philosophers in the world today. Since the publication in 1960 of his magnum opus Truth and Method, his philosophical hermeneutics has been the focus of a great deal of attention and controversy. His ideas have been applied to questions of interpretation in the study of art and literature, to issues of knowledge and objectivity in the social sciences, and even to reevaluations of philosophy itself. This book is a systematic introduction to Gadamer's work, presented with a clarity of exposition and argument that makes it rewarding to...

Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics - one of the seminal philosophies of the 20th century - has had a profound influence on a wide array of fields, including classical philology, theology, the philosophy of the social sciences, literary theory, philosophy of law, critical social theory and the philosophy of art. This collection expands on some of these areas and takes his hermeneutics into yet new fields including narrative medicine, biotechnology, the politics of memory, the philosophy of place and the non-verbal language of the body. And, building on Gadamer's well-known...

The fifth volume in the Fundamentals of Philosophy Series, Debating Sex and Gender by Georgia Warnke is a concise yet in-depth introduction to contemporary feminist thought on sex and gender. Featuring a lucid and accessible writing style, the book focuses on four historical debates: the relation and possible distinction between sex (biologically based) and gender (culturally based); questioning the binary (male-female) character of sex and gender; the idea of gender as a performance and as a performative; and the intersection of gender with race, class, and other features of...

Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics - one of the seminal philosophies of the 20th century - has had a profound influence on a wide array of fields, including classical philology, theology, the philosophy of the social sciences, literary theory, philosophy of law, critical social theory and the philosophy of art. This collection expands on some of these areas and takes his hermeneutics into yet new fields including narrative medicine, biotechnology, the politics of memory, the philosophy of place and the non-verbal language of the body. And, building on Gadamer's well-known...