Virtue in Being

Towards an Ethics of the Unconditioned

By Andrew Benjamin

Subjects: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Ethics
Series: SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Paperback : 9781438461625, 218 pages, July 2017
Hardcover : 9781438461618, 218 pages, October 2016

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Toward the Unconditioned: Kant, Epicurus and Glückseligkeit

2. Arendt and the Time of the Pardon

3. Kant, Evil, and the Unconditioned

4. Judgment after Derrida

Notes
Bibliography
Index

A radical rethinking of ethics set within the development of a philosophical anthropology.

Description

In his last book, Towards a Relational Ontology, Andrew Benjamin provided a philosophical account of what he terms anoriginal relationality, demonstrating how this concept can be seen to be at work throughout the history of philosophy. In Virtue in Being, he builds on that project to argue for a new way of understanding the relationship between ontology and ethics through insightful readings of texts by Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. Structuring the book around the themes of violence, evil, and pardon, Benjamin builds a convincing case for the connections he draws between thinkers not commonly associated with one another.

Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at Monash University, Australia and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Kingston University, London. He is the author of Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy's Other Possibility and the coeditor (with Dimitris Vardoulakis) of Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger, both also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"In this original and engaging study, Benjamin opens a nuanced dialogue between the work of Kant, Arendt, and Derrida to create a conversation about virtue that illuminates our human condition. Benjamin's innovative scholarship enriches our understanding of each of the figures he treats." — Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, author of Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy