This volume collects twenty-one original essays that discuss Michael Krausz’s distinctive and provocative contribution to the theory of interpretation. At the beginning of the book Krausz offers a synoptic review of his central claims, and he concludes with a substantive essay that replies to scholars from the United States, England, Germany, India, Japan, and Australia. Krausz’s philosophical work centers around a distinction that divides interpreters of cultural achievements into two groups. Singularists assume that for any object of interpretation only one single admissible interpretation can exist. Multiplists assume that for some objects of interpretation more than one interpretation is admissible. A central question concerns the ontological entanglements involved in interpretive activity. Domains of application include works of art and music, as well as literary, historical, legal and religious texts. Further topics include truth commissions, ethnocentrism and interpretations across cultures.
Michael Krausz is Milton C. Nahm Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. He is the author of Rightness and Reasons: Interpretation in Cultural Practices, Varieties of Relativism (with Rom Harré), Limits of Rightness, Interpretation and Transformation: Explorations in Art and the Self, and Dialogues on Relativism, Absolutism and Beyond: Four Days in India. Krausz is also contributing editor or co-editor of eleven volumes on relativism, rationality, interpretation, cultural identity, creativity, and related themes. He has taught at the University of Toronto, Georgetown University, Oxford University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, American University in Cairo, University of Nairobi, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, and University of Ulm. See also the festschrift: Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz."
As a visual artist, Michael Krausz has had thirty-three solo and duo exhibitions in galleries in the U.S., U.K., and India. As a musician, Krausz is the founding Artistic Director and Conductor of the Great Hall Chamber Orchestra, comprised of forty young professional musicians, collaborating as soloists with principal players of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. Krausz also teaches Aesthetics at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
