Introduction: Toward a comparative political theory

Review of Politics

Volumn 59, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 421-427

  Dallmayr, Fred ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43349111961     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500027662     Document Type: Editorial

References (5)

1. See Raimundo Panikkar, "What is Comparative Philosophy Comparing?" in Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy, ed. Gerald J. Larson and Eliot Deutsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1988), pp.116- 136, esp. pp. 127-29. The same essay proposes the method of "diatopical hermeneutics" defined in these terms: "Diatopical hermeneutics is the required method of interpretation when the distance to overcome, needed for any understanding, is not just a distance within one single culture...or a temporal one...but rather a distance between two (or more) cultures, which have independently developed in different spaces (topoi) their own methods of philosophizing and ways of reaching intelligibility along with their proper categories" (p.130).
2. For a similar proposal, under the label "hermeneutics of difference," see Fred Dallmayr, Bevond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 39-62.
3. For the interlacing of universal truth and contextually situated dialogue see Kenneth L. Schmitz, "The Unity of Human Nature and the Diversity of Cultures" in Relations Between Cultures, ed. George F. McLean and John Kromkowski (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy,1991), pp. 305-322.
4. Presently, there are virtually no general texts in this field. For exceptions see Anthony J. Parel and Ronald C. Keith, eds., Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies under the Upas Tree (Newbury Park, CA: Sage,1992);
5. and Bhikhu Parekh and Thomas Pantham, eds., Political Discourse: Explorations in Indian and Western Political Thought (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987).