When we think in terms of the durability of historical texts, some works instantly come to mind: Herodotus’, Thucydides’, and Polybius’ war narratives, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Jules Michelet’s History of France, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean, and Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, among many others. Historians instantly perceive them as durable texts, part of a canon of history and historiography. I examine in this chapter the conditions that might be considered necessary for historical writing to achieve durability, justify why some historical texts have the potential for durability, propose what conditions of creation and reception enabled this longevity, and discuss what practical lessons we obtain from this inquiry. I begin making some distinctions among the three related concepts of durability, the classic, and the canon. I then try to establish the specific conditions of durability of historical texts, focusing on the concepts of Chronotope (Mikhail Bakhtin), the effect of contemporaneity (Gadamer and Koselleck), temporalization (Heidegger, Ricoeur), timelessness (Hartog), and the connections between the concepts of durability and the practical past (Oakeshott, Hayden White).

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

This chapter examines the temporality around which international law is articulated, with an emphasis on the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter specifically elaborates on how the doctrine of international responsibility suspends international law’s one-directional temporality and provides discursive devices that allow one to travel back and forth between the past of wrongfulness and the present of responsibility. Such two-directional temporality, the chapter argues, is at the service of the narrative function of international responsibility in that such two-way time travel allows a re-representation of the real produced by legal claims made under the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter ends with concluding remarks on the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

This chapter discusses the commonalities and differences between reading and listening by focusing on the commonalities and differences between writing and speaking. Common to writing and speaking is that they are both activities that normally have a fourfold intentionality: (1) they are performed intentionally; (2) they are targeted at other people; (3) they are about things; and (4) they are the means by which the author intends to reach certain aims. Next, I discuss Paul Ricoeur's views on the distinction between writing and speaking, in which the notion of autonomy plays an important role. It is argued that Ricoeur is not successful in bringing out the distinction that he is groping for and that a more adequate view on the distinction should make use of the idea that at least some writing is creative‐investigative – that is, some writing is such that an author would not and even could not have formed the thoughts and ideas expressed in their text if they had not engaged in writing.

Narrates a shift in reading methods from notions of objectivity and authorial intent to a reader-oriented approach which emphasizes the reader as the subject who interprets the text. Drawing upon the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Schneiders argues that reading scripture is an event with the potential to transform the reader through the transcendent reality mediated by the text.

In this essay, we contend that new ways of working imply a crisis both of communities and politics in our societies. We introduce the concept of 'co-politicisation' to make sense of the potential highly transformative political power of managerial agency in society. In the context of ongoing work transformations, managerial agency increasingly seems to become a political agency, through its potential to transform society and the sense of togetherness. However, in the meantime, politics has entered into crisis. Each of us has the possibility to express their own, individual voice, but without building, in turn, any meaningful or resonant collective and community. We argue that a temporal approach is needed to understand such a crisis of community and of the politics. To that end, we introduce Paul Ricoeur (1985)’s thought on a ‘crisis of the present’ that we apply to new ways of working. We conclude by suggesting that new ways of working may be missing practices likely to produce the extra-temporality that managerial agency needs to perform. Without this extra-temporality, the managerial agency of new ways of working just keeps weakening our sense of togetherness.

Chapter 6 focuses on how, for Toni Morrison’s Sethe in Beloved, a sense of precarity comes from the brutal conditions of slavery from which she has recently escaped as well as from her own traumatic attempt at murdering her children so as to take them out of the circuitry of enslavement. I isolate the terms of the ethical topos that Morrison so suggestively lays out behind Sethe’s terrible choice and connect this to other aspects of the novel. These historical and personal details about the violence of slavery form a potent background to our reading of the novel and allow us to attend closely to the problem of moral residue that is seen most tellingly in Baby Suggs’s response to Sethe’s choice. I return to Aristotle’s anagnorisis (but this time split between two characters) as a way of reviewing one of the central concepts of tragedy.

The first text where Rorty addresses Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics in this paper Rorty explains the reasons for his lack of interest in the French thinker’s views. A nice companion to the “Kant as a Critical Philosopher” paper, Rorty here suggests that both phenomenology and linguistic analysis are united by the shared enemy of Cartesianism. Rorty judges the linguistic analyst to be the better candidate of the two to lead “the anti-Cartesian revolution” and distills their position to three central metaphilosophical claims: the Pragmatist thesis; the Naturalistic thesis; and the Conventionalist thesis. He uses this platform to critique Ricoeur’s phenomenological approach to problems in the philosophy of language.

The conjunction in our title requires some explanation, if not justification, in the context in which this book is published. This book aims to introduce the undergraduate, postgraduate and general reader to a literary and intellectual relationship which is richer in German than in any other European culture. That is the constant and reciprocal relationship in the German-speaking world since the Middle Ages between literary and religious practice and discourse.