This book revisits Paul Ricoeur's classification of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the “masters of suspicion”, and provides a thought-provoking critique for critical religious studies scholars, as well as anyone working in critical theory more broadly. Whereas Ricoeur saw suspicion as a mode of interpretation, Andrew Dole argues that the method common to his “masters” is better understood as a mode of explanation. Dole replaces Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion with suspicious explanation, which claims the existence of hidden phenomena that are bad in some recognizable way. Each of the masters, Dole argues, offered a distinct kind of suspicious explanation. Reconstructing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in this way brings their work into conversation with conspiracy theories, which are themselves a type of suspicious explanation. Dole argues that conspiracy theories and other types of suspicious explanation are “cognitively ensnaring”, to borrow a term from Pascal Boyer. If they are true they are importantly true, but their truth or falsity can be very difficult to ascertain.
Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was one of the most prolific and influential French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. In his enormous corpus of work he engaged with literature, history, historiography, politics, theology and ethics, while debating 'truth' and ethical solutions to life in the face of widespread and growing suspicion about whether such a search is either possible or worthwhile. In Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, Alison Scott-Baumann takes a thematic approach that explores Ricoeur's lifelong struggle to be both iconoclastic and yet hopeful, and avoid the slippery slope to relativism. Through an examination of the 'hermeneutics of suspicion', the book reveals strong continuities throughout his work, as well as significant discontinuities, such as the marked way in which he later distanced himself from the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' and his development of new devices in its place, while seeking a hermeneutics of recovery. Scott-Baumann offers a highly original analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion that will be useful to the fields of philosophy, literature, theology and postmodern social theory.
The Commentaries were long regarded as the leading work on the development of English law and played a role in the development of the American legal system. They were in fact the first methodical treatise on the common law suitable for a lay readership since at least the Middle Ages. This is book four out of four, including more than 1700 footnotes and annotations.