PHIL 3270 Hermeneutics of Justice

Hermeneutics as a philosophical discipline deals with interpretation and understanding of different perspectives on reality, the nature of things, and human affairs. Gadamers hermeneutics (theory of understanding) has deep influences on how we understand the meaning of texts, human actions, existence, and view justice as an ongoing interpretive, dialogical, practical, realizational event (as gaining insight through experience), and not merely the implementation of fixed and abstract rules. This course examines fundamental questions about the nature of justice, retribution, the relationship between justice and fairness, contemporary debates on the language of justice as a factor in peoples experience of injustice, inequality, discrimination, prejudice, structural violence, and various theoretical and practical issues of law, ethics, politics, and public policy. It is an attempt to obtain a comprehensive account of justice for a better world based on a hermeneutical framework of interpretation. It seeks to develop a continental philosophy on comparative/intercultural theories of justice, the linguisticality of justice, and the humanism of justice. Emphasis will be placed throughout the course on readings some texts by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Amartya Sen, Makau Mutua, Tsenay Serequeberhan, Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon, Jean Grondin, and other scholars.