Perspectives on Human Suffering

✍ Scribed by Jeff Malpas, Norelle Lickiss (auth.), Jeff Malpas, Norelle Lickiss (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 364
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume brings together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on a topic of central importance, but which has otherwise tended to be approached from within just one or another disciplinary framework. Most of the essays contained here incorporate some degree of interdisciplinarity in their own approach, but the volume nevertheless divides into three main sections: Philosophical considerations; Humanities approaches; Legal, medical, and therapeutic contexts.

The volume includes essays by philosophers, medical practitioners and researchers, historians, lawyers, literary, Classical, and Judaic scholars. The essays are united by a common concern with the question of the human character of suffering, and the demands that suffering, and the recognition of suffering, make upon us.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Front Matter....Pages 7-7
Introduction: Human Suffering....Pages 1-6
Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility of a Humane Politics....Pages 9-21
Pathei Mathos: The Political-Cognitive Value of Suffering....Pages 23-32
Economies of Suffering: Kierkegaard and Levinas....Pages 33-42
The Other Thing About Suffering....Pages 43-48
‘Giving the World a More Human Face’—Human Suffering in African Thought and Philosophy....Pages 49-61
Suffering as Substantive and Subjective: Slavoj Žižek, Hannah Arendt and the Body’s Pain....Pages 63-77
Suffering and Forgiveness: An Heroic Journey....Pages 79-95
Front Matter....Pages 97-97
The Suffering of Job: He is Every Person and No-One....Pages 99-111
The Meaning and the Experience of Suffering: A Historian’s Perspective....Pages 113-119
Jewish Responses to Suffering....Pages 121-130
Suffering and Ancient Therapy: Plato to Cicero....Pages 131-154
Ancient Greek Responses to Suffering: Thinking with Philoctetes....Pages 155-169
Historicizing Suffering....Pages 171-179
The Politics of Suffering: Aboriginal Health in Contemporary Australia....Pages 181-203
Front Matter....Pages 205-205
Some Aspects of Human Suffering and the Criminal Law....Pages 207-211
Suffering: A Perspective From Law....Pages 213-225
To Suffer With: The Poetry of Compassion....Pages 227-244
On Facing Human Suffering....Pages 245-260
Suffering Seeks a Voice....Pages 261-272
Front Matter....Pages 205-205
Technological Efficiency, Human Dignity, and the Meaning of Suffering....Pages 273-286
Suffering and the Sleeplessness of Clinicians....Pages 287-305
The Selfsame Well: Human Suffering in Grief and Bereavement....Pages 307-316
Reflections on Compassion, Suffering and Occupational Stress....Pages 317-336
Mental Suffering and the Brain: Insights from Neurology and Literature....Pages 337-356
Back Matter....Pages 343-343

✦ Subjects

Philosophy of Medicine; Medicine/Public Health, general; Quality of Life Research; Biomedicine general; Law, general; Psychology, general