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Kant’s notion of autonomy remains influential and important, not only for his immediate successors, but also well beyond them. This notion, however, is exposed to a powerful critique in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. This book specifically takes up this critique in order to insert Theodor Adorno as a forceful and urgent voice within the German Idealist tradition. It is argued that in doing so, we gain deeper insight into Adorno as much as German Idealism. For example, Adorno’s critique shows how Kant’s rational theology is essential to his Critical project, while at the same time, Adorno’s own notion of autonomy aims exactly to navigate between the Scylla of Kant’s rational theology on the one hand and the Charybdis of the dialectic of enlightenment on the other. Thereby in constant dialogue with Adorno’s two greatest interlocutors, Kant and Hegel, this book elaborates Adorno’s elusive notion of autonomy, all within the normative environment of a world ‘after Auschwitz.’ Equally important to the book’s aims, however, is a running dialogue with contemporary Anglo-American philosophy (including contemporary appropriations of German Idealism). In this way, with Adorno’s notion of autonomy, the book considers Adorno’s moral psychology, philosophy of action, and ethical theory, ultimately situating Adorno as an important voice in contemporary discussions.

The question of a “right to die” — or what is sometimes called euthanasia or assisted-suicide — remains today the subject of vexed legal, political, ethical and philosophic debates. The Sacred Part brings the thought of deconstruction to bear on this debate to uncover the knot of unexamined assumptions at its core. The book first outlines a strategy and protocol of deconstruction to be employed in the analyses that follow. To contextualize the contemporary debate, the book provides a selective genealogy, from Cicero to Kant, of the concept of “human dignity,” and considers its relation to two other abstractions: “sovereignty” and “sanctity.” The book also considers a few outstanding examples of the philosophic approach to suicide in general. The concept of dignity proves to be characterized by a strange groundlessness by which it denotes the value of humanity in terms of a shifting relation of calculable and incalculable value. Similarly, the common theological and ethical prohibition of suicide proves to be recurrently troubled by a figure of sacrificial calculation. Such problems account for the unacknowledged contradictions that continue to emerge in the contemporary debate about a right to die. Finally, The Sacred Part rethinks the fundamental opposition at work in this question by envisioning a just care: a mutual commitment to one another that, making practically and economically possible the maintenance of life to its mortal limit, would correspondingly make possible a practical right to decide for death.

What does a good life look like? How do people become good? Are there multiple, competing possibilities for what counts as a good life, all equally worthy? Or, is there a unified and transcendent conception of the good that should guide our judgment of the possibilities? What does a good life look like when it is guided by God? How is a good life involved with the lives of others? And, finally, how good is good enough? These questions are the focus of this book, the product of a year-long conversation about goodness. Its eight chapters challenge the dichotomies that usually govern how goodness has been discussed in the past: altruism versus egoism; reason versus emotion; or moral choice versus moral character. Instead, the contributors seek to expand the terms of the discussion by coming at goodness from a variety of perspectives: psychological, philosophic, literary, religious, and political. In each case, they emphasize the lived realities and particulars of moral phenomena, taking up examples and illustrations from life, literature, and film—from Achilles and Billy Budd, to Oskar Schindler and Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, to Iris Murdoch and the citizens of Flagstaff, Arizona.

When French philosopher Paul Ricoeur died in 2005, he bequeathed to the world a highly regarded, widely influential body of work which established him as one of the greatest thinkers of our time. He also left behind a number of unfinished projects that are gathered here and translated into English for the first time. This book consists of one major essay and nine fragments. Composed in 1996, the essay is the kernel of an unrealized book on the subject of mortality. Likely inspired by his wife's approaching death, it examines not one's own passing but one's experience of others dying. Ricoeur notes that when thinking about death the imagination is paramount, since we cannot truly experience our own passing. But those we leave behind do, and Ricoeur posits that the idea of life after death originated in the awareness of our own end posthumously resonating with our survivors. The fragments in this volume were written over the course of the last few months of Ricoeur's life as his health failed, and they represent his very last work. They cover a range of topics, touching on biblical scholarship, the philosophy of language, and the idea of selfhood he first addressed in Oneself as Another. And while they contain numerous philosophical insights, these fragments are perhaps most significant for providing an invaluable look at Ricoeur's mind at work. As poignant as it is perceptive, this book is a moving testimony to Ricoeur's willingness to confront his own mortality with serious questions, a touching insouciance, and hope for the future.

What is the nature of the fundamental relation we have to ourselves that makes each of us a self? To answer this question, this book develops a systematic theory of the self, challenging the widespread view that the self's defining relation to itself is to have an immediate knowledge of its own thoughts. On the contrary, the book maintains, our essential relation to ourselves is practical, as is clear when we consider the nature of belief and desire. For to believe or desire something consists in committing ourselves to thinking and acting in accord with the presumed truth of our belief or the presumed value of what we desire. The book develops this conception with frequent reference to such classic authors as Montaigne, Stendhal, and Proust and by comparing it to other views of the self in contemporary philosophy. It also discusses the important ethical consequences of a theory of the self, arguing that it allows us to better grasp what it means to be ourselves and why self-understanding often involves self-creation.

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. In Volume One of this two-volume study, a reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory was carried out. This second volume offers a comprehensive and critical reading of the Foucauldian counterpoint. A history, theorized Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comprehensive charting of structural transformations and displacements over time. Contrary to other Foucault scholars, the text here proposes an “axial” rather than a developmental reading of Foucault's work. This allows aspects of Foucault's famous triad of knowledge, power, and the subject to emerge in each of his major works. This book maps existentialist categories across Foucault's “quadrilateral,” the model that Foucault proposes as defining modernist conceptions of knowledge. At stake is the degree to which Sartre's thought is fully captured by this mapping, whether he was, as Foucault claimed, “a man of the nineteenth century trying to think in the twentieth.”

The general consensus among philosophers is that the use of torture is never justified. This book demonstrates the weakness of the case against torture. While allowing that torture constitutes a moral wrong, it nevertheless argues that, in exceptional cases, it represents the lesser of two evils. The book does not take this position lightly. It begins by examining the way terrorism challenges traditional norms, discussing the morality of various practices of torture, and critically exploring the infamous ticking time-bomb scenario. After carefully considering these issues from a purely philosophical perspective, the book turns to the empirical ramifications of his arguments, addressing criticisms of torture and analyzing the impact its adoption could have on democracy, institutional structures, and foreign policy. The crucial questions of how to justly authorize torture and how to set limits on its use make up the final section of the book.

Human beings are intrinsically vulnerable, injurable, and dependent creatures. For this reason, the primary source for the meaning of morals is the experience of moral injury. Through investigating what is suffered in torture and rape, a conception of moral injury is constructed. No matter how physically painful, moral injuries always involve an injury to the status of an individual as a person, a violent devaluing or degrading of the victim. Humiliation is the everyday version of such injuring; devastation (the moral version of trauma) is the extreme version that occurs as a consequence of torture and rape. Only living, embodied beings who must be recognized by and thus depend on their immediate social fellows for their standing as a person can suffer devastation in this way. To suffer devastation is to suffer loss of trust in the world. Trust, as a form of mutual recognition, is the invisible ethical substance of everyday living. To recognize another’s standing as a person is to respect their dignity. Dignity is a fragile social possession that is product of everyday practices of trust that are now best protected by the rule of law.