TOLERATION AND POLITICAL CONFLICT
1 B. Williams, ‘Tolerating the Intolerable’, in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Selected, edited with an introduction by A.W. Moore, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton Universitity Press, 2006, pp. 126-134, 126. 2 C. McKinnon, Toleration. A criticical introduction, London/New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 6-7; cf. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 126-1130. 3 A.E. Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 20; cf. R.H. Dees, Trust and Toleration, London/New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 4. 4 H. Paetzold, ‘Review essay. Respect and toleration considered’, in Philosophy and Social Criticism 34 (2008) 941-954, p. 951. TOLERATION AND POLITICAL CONFLICT
Tolerance as a Virtue of Justice
Abstract This article argues that the civic virtue of tolerance has to be understood as a virtue of justice. Based on an analysis of the concept of toleration and its paradoxes, it shows that toleration is a ‘normatively dependent concept’ that needs to take recourse to a conception of justice in order to solve these paradoxes. At the center of this conception of justice lies a principle of reciprocal and general justification with the help of which a distinction between moral norms and ethical values is possible. While the former are strictly binding and define the realm of the tolerable, the latter are subject to reasonable disagreement that calls for toleration. Essentially, the virtue of tolerance is the capacity and willingness to accept the principle and criteria of justification of generally binding norms in an ethically pluralist society.This virtue is analyzed with respect to its normative and epistemological components. Finally, the idea of a ‘tolerant character’ is discussed.
Unity Identity Text Self
Abstract Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.