The Responsible Self was H. Richard Niebuhr's most important work in Christian ethics. In it he probes the most fundamental character of the moral life and it stands today as a landmark contribution to the field. The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works (...) in the field. (shrink)

Narrative and the real world are not mutually exclusive. Life is not a structureless sequence of events; it consists of complex structures of temporal configurations that interlock and receive their meaning from within action itself. It is also not true that life lacks a point of view which transforms events into a story by telling them. Our focus of attention is not the past but the future, because we grasp configurations extending into the future. Action involves the adoption of an (...) anticipated future-retrospective point of view on the present. The actions of life can be viewed as the process of telling ourselves stories. The retrospective view of the narrator is an extension and refinement of a viewpoint inherent in action itself. Because storytelling is a social activity, the story of one's life is told as much to others as to oneself. Social human time, like individual human time, is constructed into configured sequences. The practical first-order narrative process that constitutes a person or a community can become a second-order narrative whose subject is unchanged but whose interest is primarily cognitive or aesthetic. (shrink)

"For description and defense of the narrative configurations of everyday life, and of the practical and social character of those narratives, there is no better treatment than Time, Narrative, and History.... a clear, judicious, and truthful account, provocative from beginning to end." —Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology "... a superior work of philosophy that tells a unique and insightful story about narrative." —Quarterly Journal of Speech.

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal (...) fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The thesis of this article is that engagement and suffering are essential aspects of responsible caregiving. The sense of medical responsibility engendered by engaged caregiving is referred to herein as clinical phronesis, i.e. practical wisdom in health care, or, simply, practical health care wisdom. The idea of clinical phronesis calls to mind a relational or communicative sense of medical responsibility which can best be understood as a kind of virtue ethics, yet one that is informed by the exigencies of moral (...) discourse and dialogue, as well as by the technical rigors of formal reasoning. The ideal of clinical phronesis is not (necessarily) contrary to the more common understandings of medical responsibility as either beneficence or patient autonomy — except, of course, when these notions are taken in their disengaged form (reflecting the malaise of modern medicine). Clinical phronesis, which gives rise to a deeper, broader, and richer, yet also to a more complex, sense than these other notions connote, holds the promise both of expanding, correcting, and perhaps completing what it currently means to be a fully responsible health care provider. In engaged caregiving, providers appropriately suffer with the patient, that is, they suffer the exigencies of the patient's affliction (though not his or her actual loss) by consenting to its inescapability. In disengaged caregiving — that ruse Katz has described as the silent world of doctor and patient — provides may deny or refuse any given connection with the patient, especially the inevitability of the patient's affliction and suffering (and, by parody of reasoning, the inevitability of their own. When, however, responsibility is construed qualitatively as an evaluative feature of medical rationality, rather than quantitatively as a form of calculative reasoning only, responsibility can be viewed more broadly as not only a matter of science and will, but of language and communication as well — in particular, as the task of responsibly narrating and interpreting the patient's story of illness. In summary, the question is not whether phronesis can save the life of medical ethics — only responsible humans can do that! Instead, the question should be whether phronesis, as an ethical requirement of health care delivery, can prevent the death of medical ethics. (shrink)

He finds the key in the concept of responsibility, which implies not only the freedom and flexibility of responsiveness to others but also a guiding ideal of ...

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)

Oliver Sacks MD, Clinical Professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, talked with Anthony Freeman during his visit to London in January 1995 to publicize his recently published book An Anthropologist on Mars. The interview is preceded by an overview of the book.

The essay sets forth a historical style in ethics. At the center is the explication of meanings forming the life worlds of representative actors in concrete situations. The sense of life world is sketched in terms of intentionality, intersubjectivity, temporality and embodiment. The essay then delineates the kinds of interpretative activity relevant for understanding life situations: the application of received conventions; suspicion of those conventions as distortions of underlying personal/social dynamics; and a dialectical interplay between a retrieval of one's own (...) traditions, and hospitality to understandings of others differently oriented to the situations in question. The goal is the achievement of common ground which enables us to determine "fitting" action, or at least to keep open the wholeness it promises. (shrink)

Textkritische Edition dreier exegetischer Werke Schleiermachers. Im vorliegenden Band werden Schleiermachers Monographie zum Lukas-Evangelium von 1817 sowie seine Aufsätze über Kolosser 1,15-20 und über die Zeugnisse des Papias von den beiden ersten Evangelien von 1832 in einer kritischen Edition dargeboten. Mit Namen-, Stellen- und Sachregister.