This interdisciplinary volume connects the philosophy of history to moral philosophy with a unique focus on time. Taking in a range of intellectual traditions, cultural, and geographical contexts, the volume provides a rich tapestry of approaches to time, morality, culture, and history.
By extending the philosophical discussion on the ethical importance of temporality, the editors disentangle some of the disciplinary tensions between analytical and hermeneutic philosophy of history, cultural theory, meta-ethical theory, and normative ethics. The ethical and existential character of temporality reveals itself within a collection that resists the methodological underpinnings of any one philosophical school. The book's distinctive cross-cultural approach ensures a wide range of perspectives with contributions on life and death in Japanese philosophy, ethics and time in Maori philosophy, non-traditional temporalities and philosophical anthropology, as well as global approaches to ethics.
These new directions of study highlight the importance of the ethical in the temporal, inviting further points of departure in this burgeoning field.
Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Temporal Humanity: Involvement with Ethics and Time Across Cultures, Natan Elgabsi and Bennett Gilbert I. History as Ethics 1. Past Deeds and the On-going Work of History, Réal Fillion 2. The Time of Ghosts and the Ghosts of Time, Ethan Kleinberg 3. Gifts from the Dead: Heritage and the Ligatures of History, Hans Ruin 4. Multilayered Temporalities Underlying Transitional Justice: Rethinking Resentment and Melancholia from Jean Améry and Walter Benjamin, Rafael Pérez Baquero II. Agency, Relativity, and Affect 5. The Relativism of Historical Distance and the Contextual Constitution of Agency, Nora Hämäläinen 6. Heroism, Self-determination, and Magnanimity: Hegel and Brandom on Self-conscious Agency, Chiel van den Akker 7. Farness and Immemorial Time: An Ontology of Vestiges, Roberto Wu III. Mortality and Personal Identity 8. Neither to Be, Nor not to Be: The Interrelation of Life and Death in Tanabe’s Later Philosophy of Death, Takeshi Morisato 9. Arresting Time’s Arrow: Death, Loss, and the Preservation of Real Union, Megan Fritts 10. Heidegger’s Process Metaphysics of Personhood, Anne Sophie Meincke IV. Reconsidering Ontology 11. “When the time is right…” In the Maori World, Georgina Tuari Stewart 12. Levinas on Time: The Ethical Import of our Existential Chronological Inconsistency, Benda Hofmeyr 13. Historical Time, Collective Memory, and the Finitude of Historical Understanding, Jeffrey Andrew Barash 14. The Time of History, Jan-Ivar Lindén V. Concluding Reflections from Existential Anthropology 15. The Death of the Angel: In Search of a Tango of Temporal Humanity, Ruth Behar Index
Natan Elgabsi is Postdoctoral Researcher at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Bennett Gilbert is Assistant Professor at Portland State University, USA.
Reviews for Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: A Cross-Cultural Approach
A perennial challenge for existential anthropology is how to reconcile situated accounts of ethics, time, and personhood with universalizing accounts of the human condition. The diverse and penetrating essays in this volume show how such a cross-cultural approach to issues of temporality, historicity, and morality may be developed and applied. * Michael Jackson, Senior Research Fellow in World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, USA * Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History brings together scholars from different philosophical traditions to provide fresh perspectives on fundamental issues. Its unifying concern is with humans as beings-in-time: what it means to be shaped historically and what obligations and possibilities may flow from understanding that shaping. The book deserves an audience right across the humanities. * Donald Bloxham, Richard Pares Professor of History, University of Edinburgh, UK * This timely collection brings to bear a welcome existential and hermeneutical approach to the contemporary issues of the philosophy of culture and history. Often rooted in personal experience, as good philosophy always is, its rich contributions shed new light on our ethical experience of time and mortality in this uncertain 21st Century. * Jean Grondin, Professor of Philosophy, University of Montreal, Canada *
