50 Mark Washofsky
15. See David R. Hiley, James F. Bowman and Richard Shusterman , eds., The Interpretive Turn; Philosophy, Science and Culture(Ithaca , NY : Cornell University Press , 1999), p. 1.
16. The proper citation here is Thomas Kuhn ’s celebrated work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 1970), which famously described the influence of existing“paradigms” of knowledge upon the work of scientists.
17.“Alles Verstehen ist Auslegung”; Hans-Georg Gadamer , Wahrheit und Methode: Grundziige einer philosophischen Hermeneutik.(Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1975, pp. 366, 375, and 377. See also H.G. Gadamer , Truth and Method . Translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. C. Marshall(New York : Crossroad, revised edition, 1989), pp. 307-308:“Understanding always involves something like the application of the text to be understood to the present situation of the interpreter.” Gadamer ’s influence is crucial in the writings of most contemporary hermeneutical theorists, including many who work in the discipline of jurisprudence. See, in general, Gregory Leyh, ed., Legal Hermeneutics(Berkeley : University of California Press , 1991) and Menachem Mautner ,“Gadamer vehamishpat,” Iyunei Mishpat(Tel Aviv University Law Review) 23:2(March, 2000), pp. 367-419.
18. By“liberal” I have in mind those scholars who consciously identify themselves with non-Orthodox movements and whose bioethical writings are exercises in halakhic methodology. Exemplary among these is Elliot Dorff, Matters of Life and Death: A Jewish Approach to Modern Medical Ethics(Philadelphia : Jewish Publication Society , 1998). See as well the various essays in Walter Jacob and Moshe Zemer , eds., Death and Euthanasia in Jewish Law(Pittsburgh and Tel Aviv : Rodef Shalom Press, 1995). Particularly instructive is the article by Peter Knobel in pp. 27-60 of that volume, an article substantially reprinted in William Cutter, ed., Healing and the Jewish Imagination(Woodstock, V.: Jewish Lights, 2007), 171183. A number— though not all— of these essays argue that active euthanasia or physician assisted suicide are justifiable Jewish responses to terminal illness. While this position clearly runs counter to the accepted traditional consensus, as well as to the position enunciated in most Reform responsa, those authors defend and elaborate their view by means of halakhic reasoning— that is, by appeal to precedential texts.