THEOLOGICALLY-ETHIC HISTORICISM OF B. PASTERNAK

Historicism Blues

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

Linguistics, Historicism and the Humanities

Historicism, Entrenchment, and Conventionalism

W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its histor...

The Protestant Ethic versus the "New Ethic"

Reading Romans Theologically: a Review Article

Major commentaries on various books of the Bible have been appearing at a dizzying pace in recent years. I have also been struck by the increasing length of such commentaries. W. D. Davies and Dale Allison are writing a three-volume commentary on Matthew for the ICC series. John Nolland composed a three-volume commentary on Luke (WBC). Raymond Brown’s work on the epistles of John (AB) is 812 pa...