Description: How do we stand in relation to everything that comes down to us from the past? Is the very idea of tradition still useful in the wake of historical ruptures, such as the Holocaust, changes in the canon, and the end of colonialism? Drawing on a wide range of philosophers and li...
Review Quotes: In this delightfully angular collection, Donald Marshall conducts a conversation with insightful interlocutors in such creatively dialectical fashion as to press into the tough hermeneutical issues and yet simultaneously offer fresh readings of certain accomodatingly resilient texts. This is a conversation deeply indebted to tradition, yet which challenges and extends our appreciation of how tradition works when it works, as also how it ossifies, atrophies or collapses in upon itself when it fails the test of apparent contradiction. Marshall's own excursus upon Plato's introduction to such matters in the Symposium is a brilliant harbinger of very good critical reflection to come in the subsequent essays.