Nussbaum

This article on relationships between texts and moral development seems to have combine the hermeneutics class and the moral truth class. We bond with texts in a very hermeneutical fashion insofar as we give ourselves to the text and "fall in love" with it and allow it to shape us. This bond with the book is called a friendship by Booth but Nussbaum disagrees that it is the same with Philosophical works as it is for fiction. She argues that you dont get seduced by works of philosophy and the way we read philosophy naturally keeps the text at a distance which does not create the type of friendship that is created in fictional works. It could be that because I dont really read fiction very often I dont fully understand what she is saying but I think that Philosophy can be very seductive. We are of course taught to read with the hermeneutics of suspicion but also taught to use the hermeneutics of faith at least for the first read through. I think a good argument for showing that there is more than a hermeneutic of suspicion going on in reading philosophy is to talk to any philosophy student in a class where they read multiple short essays that come to drastically different conclusions. What I think you will find is that with every essay the student falls in love a new and abandons the old one and through out the course of the class he will have fallen in love with 9 texts that are basically arguing with each other. Though I think the hope with philosophy is that a student would go back and read them again suspiciously and work through the arguments to see problems. But at least initially I think philosophy is very seductive. This however is just a tangent on the article as a whole. The idea is that texts have a way of shaping our development specifically for this piece it is our moral development. This happens through the bond with various characters we develop and our ability to work through various scenarios through the book. This is all very interesting and very scary to me, to think of all the power a single writer could have on so many lives.