How should we deal with social diversity if we conceive it as cultural diversity? Appeals to cultural relativism and to the collective good of diversity provide inadequate answers. Taking cultural diversity seriously requires that we respond to it fairly or justly and that, in turn, requires an approach that is impartial (or neutral) amongst cultures. Claims of impartiality are often thought peculiarly implausible when applied to cultural diversity, but an impartialist approach is in fact peculiarly appropriate to that form of (...) diversity. The issue is not whether we can be impartial, but whether we are ready to accept the implications of describing a diversity as ?cultural? and, if we are, what form our impartiality should take. Attempts to avoid claims of impartiality by dealing with diversity through deliberative processes are misguided since those processes must embody commitments to impartiality if their outcomes are to be just. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the issue of intercultural understanding. I explore the role played by language in constituting human subjectivity in accordance with the common insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, in order to: affirm the complexity and fragility of the process of building understanding in fight of our immersion in specific cultural-linguistic worldviews; and demonstrate that human beings are ontologically predisposed to achieve understanding, and that this ontological predisposition is enhanced by a constant and inescapable process (...) of crossing "language boundaries" in daily life. I argue that the very manner of human induction into cultural-linguistic worldviews suggests the means by which intercultural understanding might best be fostered: through the bestowal of recognition and the cultivation of dialogical relationships. (shrink)