Theodore George’s book The Responsibility to Understand: Hermeneutical Contours of Ethical Life is a sensitive, thoughtful, and insightful invocation to rehabilitate connection and the relational capacity of our lives. This book not only invites an internal reflection of the ways I live in the world and keep in relationship to others in it, but it deeply connects to the work we do in practice professions. Like Gadamer, George offers us a sophisticated practice philosophy that resonates and coalesces with our human endeavours of understanding each other in the context of urgent social and global concerns and fundamental human experiences of suffering, pain, joy, loss, and love.

- Nancy J. Moules, University of Calgary, Journal of Applied Hermeneutics

A sensitive, thoughtful, and insightful invocation to rehabilitate connection and the relational capacity of our lives. This book not only invites an internal reflection of the ways I live in the world and keep in relationship to others in it, but it deeply connects to the work we do in practice professions. Like Gadamer, George offers us a sophisticated practice philosophy that resonates and coalesces with our human endeavours of understanding each other in the context of urgent social and global concerns and fundamental human experiences of suffering, pain, joy, loss, and love.

- Nancy J. Moules, University of Calgary, Journal of Applied Hermeneutics

George’s book is both excellent and illuminating [...] As a reader one feels guided by someone who wants to hold together multiple strands of thought and yet remain himself in the process. More than this, however, the reader is led by someone who has immersed himself in the works and words of the tradition, and someone who is at home there.

- Niall Keane, Research In Phenomenology

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In this excellent contribution to both ethics and hermeneutics, George offers a clear argument why present-day discussions on responsibility should engage with the insights of philosophical hermeneutics. The hermeneutic emphasis on understanding, as this study convincingly argues, is to be understood as a responsibility to understand.

- Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Radboud University,

Few topics have received broader attention within contemporary philosophy than that of responsibility. Theodore George makes a novel case for a distinctive sense of responsibility at stake in the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation. He argues for the significance of this hermeneutical responsibility in the context of our relations with things, animals and others, as well as political solidarity and the formation of solidarities through the arts, literature and translation.
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Theodore George makes a novel case for a distinctive sense of responsibility at stake in the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation.
Acknowledgements Preface. The Unbearable Lightness of Ethics Introduction. Contemporary Hermeneutics and the Question of Responsibility Part I. The Responsibility to Understand 1. The Responsibility to Understand 2. The Capacity for Displacement Part II. I and Thou 3. Things 4. Animals 5. Others Part III. I and We 6. Solidarity 7. Arts and Literature 8. Translation  
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Discusses how hermeneutics offers ways to develop an ethics

Product details

ISBN
9781474467643
Published
2022-05-30
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Height
216 mm
Width
138 mm
Age
P, 06
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Number of pages
240

Biographical note

Theodore George is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Tragedies of Spirit: Tracing Finitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology (SUNY, 2006). He is co-editor of The Gadamerian Mind (Routledge, forthcoming) and Philosophers and their Poets: On the Poetic Turn in German Philosophy since Kant (SUNY, 2019). He is the translator of Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy by Günter Figal (SUNY, 2010).