Ethics Embodied - by Erin McCarthy (Paperback)

About the Book

Ethics Embodied: Rethinking Selfhood through Continental, Japanese and Feminist Philosophies explores the importance of the body to ethical selfhood. Through her comparative feminist approach to ethics, the critical comparison McCarthy offers in Ethics Embodied not only illumi...

Book Synopsis

Ethics Embodied: Rethinking Selfhood through Continental, Japanese and Feminist Philosophies explores the importance of the body to ethical selfhood. Through her comparative feminist approach to ethics, the critical comparison McCarthy offers in Ethics Embodied not only illuminates complexities in Continental, Japanese and Feminist philosophies, it provides clues about how to live the model of selfhood, ethics, and the body that emerges through the encounter.

Review Quotes

A fascinating study of some important intersections between phenomenology, modern Japanese philosophy, and contemporary feminist ethics. By bringing these streams of thought together to re-assess embodiment and its significance for ethics, McCarthy simultaneously develops a novel form of cross-cultural feminist philosophy....

Ethics Embodied is, as the author notes, an introduction, but it also attempts to carve out a new approach to ethics and offers as well a re-thinking of what is essential in teaching at all levels. As an introduction, it succeeds admirably and should create considerable excitement in the minds and bodies of readers....

McCarthy builds a strong case for undertaking a crosscultural, interdisciplinary dialogue across the Continental, Japanese, and Feminist philosophical traditions. After a lucid and careful explanation of the Japanese concept of the self (ningen, as found in Watsuji's philosophy), which partakes simultaneously of the individual and the social as well as the spatial and the temporal, McCarthy builds a robust comparative analysis of these three traditions.

McCarthy writes with a clarity that shows how deeply she has thought about, and cared about, the encounter of Western feminist thinking with Japanese philosophy. Not only has she made difficult texts accessible to the general reader, she has succeeded inmaking them relevant to an important range of contemporary ethical questions. This little book represents yet another landmark in the opening of Western philosophy to the remarkable insight of an intellectual tradition whose contributions to discussions of the body are irreplaceable...

About the Author

Erin McCarthy is associate professor of philosophy at St. Lawrence University and a member of the board of directors of ASIANetwork.