Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of ObligationSUNY Press, 17. juuli 2003 - 215 pages According to James R. Mensch, a minimal requirement for ethics is that of guarding against genocide. In deciding which races are to live and which to die, genocide takes up a standpoint outside of humanity. To guard against this, Mensch argues that we must attain the critical distance required for ethical judgment without assuming a superhuman position. His description of how to attain this distance constitutes a genuinely new reading of the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, one that involves reassessing what it means to be a self. Selfhood, according to Mensch, involves both embodiment and the self-separation brought about by our encounter with others the very others who provide us with the experiential context needed for moral judgment. Buttressing his position with documented accounts of those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, Mensch shows how the self-separation that occurs in empathy opens the space within which moral judgment can occur and obligation can find its expression. He includes a reading of the major moral philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Arendt, Levinas even as he develops a phenomenological account of the necessity of reading literature to understand the full extent of ethical responsibility. Mensch s work offers an original and provocative approach to a topic of fundamental importance. |
Other editions - View all
Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation James R. Mensch Limited preview - 2012 |
Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation James R. Mensch Limited preview - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
ability abstraction action actually alterity appearing world appetite Arendt Aristotle assert attempt autonomy becomes being-in-the-world bodily body Callicles categorical imperative causality causally determined character common world concept conscience context Darwin death death instinct demands Descartes Descartes's determined embodied empathy encounter environment ethics evil example experience expression face Fackenheim fact frame freedom Freud function given gives Gorgias grasp habits Heidegger hiddenness Holocaust human condition implies individual inherent inner insofar intersubjective involves Jews Kant Kant's Kantian lack laws Leibniz Levinas manifests Marlow means Mishnah moral nature negotiation objects ontological ourselves out-of-placeness particular perceptions person perspective Plato pleasure position possibilities presence question reason regard relation rescue rescuer response result self-presence self-separation self's selfhood sense situation social instinct society Socrates standpoint stereotyping sting of conscience superego temporal things tion Trans transcendence understanding unity universal words writes Yad Vashem
References to this book
Rhetorical Agendas: Political, Ethical, Spiritual Rhetoric Society of America. Conference No preview available - 2006 |