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[...] >Only for a brief period in Western history (roughly the 19th and early >20th century) has it been axiomatically assumed that the only meaning a >text may have is the meaning given it by its original receptors. We don't >read Plato purely in the manner of the Platonic academy nor even in accord >with Middle Platonism or Neo-Platonism. That Christians read the Hebrew >Scriptures as pointing to Christ is central to Christian faith. It is a >bias, of course, but so too is any other reading of them. That an utterly >unbiased manner of reading the Hebrew Scriptures is possible is itself >something of a pre-judgment. [...] Dear Dennis, I may be insufficiently informed, but I am not aware of any school in exegesis, philology or literary criticism in the 19th or early 20th century where it was "axiomatically assumed that the only meaning a text may have is the meaning given it by its original receptors". If we could replace "original receptors" by "author", the description would match more or less with an understanding of historical philology which, although not being exactly new at the time in question and although not being entirely obsolete today, nevertheless had reached a certain predominance. For historical philology, the meaning as understood by the original receptors (a group itself not easy to define and in its understanding of the text not always easy to investigate) is only of secondary and heuristic interest, either as an obstacle (because also original receptors may deviate) or as a means to approach the understanding as intended by the author. Not in the early, but mostly in the second half of our century, apart from an 'onthological' line of thought which did put or still puts the meaning as 'existing in the text itself' in the first line (because the author may have failed to textualize the meaning which he intended, or may have created potentials of meaning he was not aware of), it was namely a school or rather several schools of 'reception oriented' criticism which reacted to this line of historical-philology and also to the 'onthologist' view and which maybe come close to **your** description. They denied the ontological status of meaning as existing in the text itself, did not regard the early or later reception only as a means to approach the 'original' understanding as intended by the author and gave up, more or less, the objective to reconstruct this 'original' meaning in its exclusivity, opening thereby maybe the doors (or some more doors which had not yet been opened by the 'onthologist' view) to all these more recent trends I myself am no longer familiar with and which seem to regard the meaning of a text exclusively as the one or many determined by the user. I would also like to point out that from the viewpoint of historical philology it is not a 'bias' to avoid assumptions of divine inspiration anticipating future events: historical philology does avoid them not because they are not true, but because they cannot be proven to be true by means of philology and therefor are no good working hypotheses for this discipline. I would say that philology notwithstanding its defects and limits works remarkably well without theology, whereas theology (if somehow based on scriptures) maybe would do less well without philology. Otfried --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Otfried Lieberknecht, Schoeneberger Str. 11, D-12163 Berlin Tel.: ++49 30 8516675 (fax on request), E-mail: [log in to unmask] Homepage for Dante Studies: http://members.aol.com/lieberk/welcome.html ORB Dante Alighieri - A Guide to Online Resources: http://orb.rhodes.edu/encyclop/culture/lit/Italian/Danindex.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%