Building on a hermeneutic tradition in which accounts of carnal embodiment are overlooked, misunderstood, or underdeveloped, this work initiates a new field of study and concern. Carnal Hermeneutics provides a philosophical approach to the body as interpretation. Transcending the traditional dualism of rational understanding and embodied sensibility, the volume argues that our most carnal sensations are already interpretations. Because interpretation truly goes “all the way down,” carnal hermeneutics rejects the opposition of language to sensibility, word to flesh, text to body. In this volume, an impressive array of today’s preeminent philosophers seek to interpret the surplus of meaning that arises from our carnal embodiment, its role in our experience and understanding, and its engagement with the wider world.

This edited collection responds to Richard Kearney’s recent work on touch, excarnation, and embodiment, as well as his broader work in carnal hermeneutics, which sets the stage for his return to and retrieval of the senses of the lived body. Here, fourteen scholars engage the breadth and depth of Kearney’s work to illuminate our experience of the body. The chapters collected within take up a wide variety of subjects, from nature and non-human animals to our experience of the sacred and the demonic, and from art’s account of touching to the political implications of various types of embodiment. Featuring also an inspired new reflection from Kearney himself, in which he lays out his vision for “anacarnation,” this volume is an important statement about the centrality of touch and embodiment in our experience, and a reminder that, despite the excarnating tendencies of contemporary life, the lived body remains a touchstone for wisdom in our increasingly complicated and fragile world. Written for scholars and students interested in touch, embodiment, phenomenology, and hermeneutics, this diverse and challenging collection contributes to a growing field of scholarship that recognizes and attempts to correct the excarnating trends in philosophy and in culture at large.

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon calls attention to the dynamic interaction that takes place between hermeneutics and phenomenology in Ricoeur’s thought. It could be said that Ricoeur’s thought is placed under a twofold demand: between the rigor of the text and the requirements of the phenomenon. The rigor of the text calls for fidelity to what the text actually says, while the requirement of the phenomenon is established by the Husserlian call to return “to the things themselves.” These two demands are interwoven insofar as there is a hermeneutic component of the phenomenological attempt to go beyond the surface of things to their deeper meaning, just as there is a phenomenological component of the hermeneutic attempt to establish a critical distance toward the world to which we belong. For this reason, Ricoeur’s thought involves a back and forth movement between the text and the phenomenon. Although this double movement was a theme of many of Ricoeur’s essays in the middle of his career, the essays in this book suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology remains implicit throughout his work. The chapters aim to highlight, in much greater detail, how this back and forth movement between phenomenology and hermeneutics takes place with respect to many important philosophical themes, including the experience of the body, history, language, memory, personal identity, and intersubjectivity.

Paul Ricoeur and Environmental Philosophy expands the scope of Ricoeur's philosophy, especially his hermeneutics, to issues of environmental philosophy and our contemporary environmental crisis. David Utsler argues that, although Ricoeur himself was not an environmental philosopher, his work provides frameworks to reconsider our way of being-in-the-world as it pertains to our relationship with the environment. The unprecendented environmental crisis can be thought of as the result of interpretations—bad ones—and the crisis we now face requires the task of new and creative interpretation. This book discusses the ways in which Ricoeur's hermeneutics has the potential to restructure the discourse and dialogue surrounding environmental issues, and to creatively mediate the many conflicting interpretations that call for resolution. Utsler does not claim this text to be a comprehensive application of Ricoeur's work to environmental philosophy, as he believes there is still a great deal more of Ricoeur's philosophy from which to draw to enrich the growing field of environmental hermeneutics.

The world is increasingly polarized along religious, ethnic, race, gender, class, and ideological lines. But must such diversity necessarily breed suspicion, fear, or violence? Richard Kearney invites us to consider another path. He wagers that the cause of our divisions often lies not in difference but in a lack of creative imagination. Ever in a spirit of dialogue, he shows how poetics and narrative imagination can break the hold of hostility and open new possibilities of reconciliation, accomplishing what moral arguments alone cannot. Now, more than ever, there is an urgent need for Kearney’s work, which addresses our current moment of crisis and division, providing pathways of creative response and healing. This book follows Kearney’s journey through the fields of philosophy of the imagination, hermeneutics, philosophy of religion, ethics, psychology, practical philosophy, and politics. The selection of writings in this volume offers to the specialist and the general reader a concise, well-rounded entry into one of the most prolific and wide-ranging thinkers in contemporary philosophy.

Radical Hospitality addresses a timely and challenging subject for contemporary philosophy: the ethical responsibility of opening borders, psychic and physical, to the stranger. Kearney and Fitzpatrick show how radical hospitality happens by opening oneself in narrative exchange to someone or something other than ourselves—by crossing borders, whether literal or figurative. Against the fears, dogmas, and demands for certainty and security that push us toward hostility, we also desire to wager with the unknown, leap into the unanticipated, and celebrate the new, a desire this book seeks to recognize and cultivate. The book contends that hospitality means chancing one’s hand, one’s arm, one’s very self, thereby opening a vital space for new voices to be heard, shedding old skins, and welcoming new understandings. Radical Hospitality engages with urgent moral conversations concerning identity, nationality, immigration, commemoration, and justice, moving between theory and praxis and on to the formative life of the classroom. Building on key critical debates on the question of hospitality ranging from phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction to neo-Kantian moral critique and Anglo-American virtue ethics, the book explores novel possibilities for an ethics of hospitality in our contemporary world of border anxiety, refugee crises, and ecological catastrophe.

Some might ask "Why Locke's theory of knowledge now?" Though appreciated for his social philosophy, Locke has been criticized for his work in the field of epistemology ever since the publication of the Essay. It is even as if Locke serves only as an example of how not to think. When people criticize Locke, they usually cite the hostile commen taries of Berkeley, Kant, Husserl, or Sellars. But, one might ask, are they not all so eager to show the excellence of their own epistemo logical views that they distort and underestimate Locke's thought? Russell aptly noted in his History of Western Philosophy that: No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consis tent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consis tent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true. There is no reason to suppose that a self consistent system contains more truth than one which, like Locke's, is obviously more or less wrong. (B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945], p. 613. ) Here Russell is uncommonly charitable with Locke.

This volume presents political phenomenology as a new specialty in western philosophical and political thought that is post-classical, post-Machiavellian, and post-behavioral. It draws on history and sets the agenda for future explorations of political issues. It discloses crossroads between ethics and politics and explores border-crossing issues. All the essays in this volume challenge existing ideas of politics significantly. As such they open new ways for further explorations BY future generations of phenomenologists and non-phenomenologists alike. Moreover, the comprehensive chronological bibliography is unprecedented and provides not only an excellent picture of what phenomenologists have already done but also a guide for the future.

The problem of the limits of reason is by no means a privileged subject of an academic discourse. By reducing reality to what can be conceived of within the paradigms of the scientific laboratory, manipulative despotism, which positivistic notion of objectivism has established, creates in a human being a unilateral conscience of the world and of oneself; a conscience that dominates today our understanding of existence in its manifold senses of Being and the world we live in. This way of thinking, based on a powerful and skillful technique aimed at controlling human life in all its dimensions, intends to impose this limiting positivistic horizon on human beings in the name of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite. Hermeneutic rationality resists the claims of modern science and promotes the culture of hospitality toward the world as it shows itself in its complexity. Maria Luisa Portocarrero, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, Professor of Philosophy, specializing in the phenomenological hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Luis Antonio Umbelino, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, Professor of Philosophy and Artistic Studies. Andrzej Wiercinski, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, Germany, Professor of Philosophy of Religion, specializing in Practical Philosophy/Philosophical Hermeneutics.

This work explores the interplay of complexity and values in nurse education from a variety of vantages. Contributors, who come from a range of international and disciplinary backgrounds, critically engage important and problematic topics that are under-investigated elsewhere. Taking an innovative approach each chapter is followed by one or more responses and, on occasion, a reply to responses. This novel dialogic feature of the work tests, animates, and enriches the arguments being presented. Thought-provoking, challenging and occasionally rumbustious in tone, this volume has something to say to both nurse educators (who may find cherished practices questioned) and students. Given the breadth and nature of subjects covered, the book will also appeal to anyone concerned about and interested in nursing’s professional development/trajectory.