"First published in this translation 1955; second edition (revised) 1974; reprinted with additional revisions 1987; reissued with new Further Reading 2003; reissued with new introduction 2007"--T.p. verso.

Su"ender and catch: give so you can receive, where the giving is your whole self, in a total experience. This is scarcely new on the American scene, and it is ancient knowledge, East and West. The fears of total surrender, the fears of self-revelation and of total abandon, although genuine, are likewise not new. Yet Kurt H. Wolff does attempt something new here, an epistemologi cal essay with the help of this old idea: his subtitle is 'experience and inquiry today'. (...) He tries to formulate an integrated view which incorporates in the theory of total experience not only the accepted component- esthetics, religion, the recent American experience - but also a metaphysics, a phenomenology, a theory of perception, a social philosophy and a methodology of the social sciences, even a philosophy of history and psychopathology. Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together. It all looks topsy-turvy at first. We have here scraps of a diary, fragments of correspondence, a stray adolescent love letter, notes on notes on field work, and notes and comments on tutorial seminars plus long excerpts from students' essays, a stray paper in a learned journal summarizing the core of the book, comments piled on comments and a web of self-references, literary criticisms, and pieces of poetry, plus a rich scholarly apparatus. (shrink)

Ethics and the Clinical Encounter explores the moral dimensions of clinical medicine and the phenomenon of illness, to determine what ethics must be in order to be fully responsive to clinical encounters. Written in a lively and conversational style with minimal technical terminology, and enhanced by actual experience or real clinical situations, this volume lays out a clinical ethics methodology both in practical and theoretical terms. Here's what the experts had to say: Professor Zaner has provided us with a remarkably (...) lucid and trenchant discussion of the interface of philosophy and the field of medicine. He brings into play an extraordinary range of historial knowledge, extensive observations based on firsthand experience with medical practices, and an acute sense of philosophical argumentation. This is a work that will be an exemplary and indispensable text in the philosophy of medicine for years to come. -- Calvin Schrag... it is a highly original contribution usable in a number of fields.... It really has no competition.... The genius of Zaner's approach is to ground ethics from the 'bottom up' and to direct us to the concrete particulars of therapeutic encounters wherein lie moral and ethical matters... meaty, challenging, and ultimately rewarding.... -- Paul R. Dokecki Richard M. Zaner founded the Center for Clinical and Research Ethics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Having established Vanderbilt's first Hospital Ethics Committee (1985), he served as co-chair of VUMC's Ethics Committee since its inception in 1990. Zaner has published five original books, edited ten, and translated four more, and has published more than 100 sections of books and professional journals. (shrink)