Ethics and Phenomenology

Edited by Mark Sanders, J. Jeremy Wisnewski

Publication date:

22 March 2012

Length of book:

362 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739150122

Ethics and Phenomenology is a collection of essays that explore the relationship between moral philosophy and the phenomenological tradition. Phenomenology is a vast and rich philosophical tradition which seeks to explain how we perceive the world. This, in turn, involves questions about one’s relationship to the world and how one both acts and should act in the world. For this reason phenomenology entails an ethics, even if such an ethics is not always apparent in the work of phenomenological thinkers
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The book is devoted to two central tasks: Section One offers essays exploring the resources available to moral philosophy in the work of the major phenomenologists of the 20th-century, including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and others. Part Two consists of essays demonstrating the way that the phenomenological method can facilitate advances in our thinking through the exploration of contemporary ethical issues, including environmentalism, intellectual property, parenting and others.

Introduction
Part I: Ethics and the Classical Phenomenologists
Chapter 1: A Phenomenological Ethics of the Absolute Ought: Investigating Husserl’s Unpublished Ethical Writings
Sophie Loidolt
Chapter 2: Between Scheler and Hartmann: Problems of a Material Value-Ethics
Eugene Kelly
Chapter 3: Heidegger’s Aristotelian Ethics
J. Jeremy Wisnewski
Chapter 4: Metaphysics after ‘the End of Metaphysics’: Recovering ‘the Good’ from Heidegger
Lawrence Vogel
Chapter 5: Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Engagement
Mark Sanders
Chapter 6: The Hell of Our Choosing: Sartre’s Ethics and the Impossibility of Interpersonal Conversion
Ed Grippe
Chapter 7: Levinasian Autonomy: How to Free a Hostage
Dwight Furrow and Mark Wheeler
Part II: Phenomenological Approaches to Issues in Ethics
Chapter 8: Hands-On Care: Tactility and Ethical Performance
Maurice Hamington
Chapter 9: The Phenomenological Shift of Parenthood
Janet Donohoe
Chapter 10: Coding the Dictatorship of ‘the They:’ A Phenomenological Critique of Digital Rights Management
Gordon Hull
Chapter 11: Person and Environment: Vital Sympathy and the Roots of Environmental Ethics
John White
Chapter 12: Husserl and the Responsibility and Sacrifice of Derrida
Janet Donohoe
Chapter 13: War as katharsis? Scheler’s Phenomenological Analysis
Susan Gottlöber
Chapter 14: Eichmann in Athens: Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and the New Problem of Evil
Lawrence Vogel
Chapter 15: From the Other to the Subject: Simone de Beauvoir and Judith ButlerLeah McClimansChapter 16: Phenomenology as an Ascetic Practice
Paul Gyllenhammer

Ethics and Phenomenology is an uncommonly interesting and well-integrated collection of essays. Beginning with new insights into the ethical thought of an array of phenomenological figures, the volume ends with a set of original ideas inspired by them. The collection provides illuminating connections between both well-known and less well-known philosophers and it delves into an important range of contemporary issues including medical care, good parenting, intellectual property law, the environment, war, evil, and the status of women. Reminding us again of the richness of the phenomenological tradition, this collection also helps us to think better about our ethical aspirations.