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"In A Common Human Ground, Claes Ryn explores the nature of this problem and sets forth a theory about what is necessary for peaceful relations to be possible." "One Western philosophical tradition, for which Plato set the pattern, maintains that the only way to genuine unity is for historical diversity to yield to universality. The implication of this view for a multicultural world would be a peace that requires that cultural distinctiveness be effaced as far as possible and replaced with a universal culture. A very different Western philosophical tradition denies the existence of universality altogether. It is represented today by postmodernist multiculturalism - a view that leaves unanswered the question as to how conflict between diverse groups might be averted." "Ryn questions both of these traditions, arguing for the potential union of universality and particularity. He contends that the two need not be enemies, but in fact need each other. Cultivating individual and national particularities is potentially compatible with strengthening and enriching our common humanity. This volume embraces the notion of universality, while at the same time historicizing it."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Leo Strauss (What Is Political Philosophy?, Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1959) proposes as a criterion for the adequacy of an interpretation of a philosophical text that it understand the "thought of a philosopher exactly as he understood himself." This claim is examined from the perspective of a newly formulated version of historicism. Knowledge cannot be regarded as a timeless entity, but rather as a continuing process within history. Thus, it is not possible either to isolate one moment in a thinker's life at which his thought formed a complete & unified system, or to isolate one's own reading from the accumulation of knowledge since the work read was first written. It is possible to recognize philosophical facts that represent the universal & permanent structure of human existence, but these facts are understood in a way subject to historical change & growth. In On Rules of Philosophic Interpretation: A Critique of Ryn's "Knowledge and History," Eugene F. Miller (U of Georgia, Athens) finds that Ryn does not develop Strauss's approach in a way consistent with what Strauss intended. This approach was intended to teach philosophic humility, & embodied a rejection of the historicist position that past thinkers can be understood better in the present than they understood themselves. Ryn's views do not appear to be historicist; further he does not refute Strauss's proposed rule, & disregards Strauss's own recognition that knowledge is not static or timeless. In Strauss and Knowledge: A Rejoinder, Claes G. Ryn finds that Miller's recommended intellectual humility is implicitly based on the idea that certain great thinkers are free of the tendencies to imprecision & incompleteness that are present in all other thinkers. Strauss's actual ideas contain a number of tensions & inconsistencies that Miller does not succeed in resolving; his repetition of Strauss's position does not establish any new basis from which that position might be defended. W. H. Stoddard.