Ebook: Ethical Humans: Life, Love, Labour, Learning and Loss

Ethical Humans questions how philosophy and social theory can help us to engage the everyday moral realities of living, working, loving and dying in new capitalism. It introduces sociology as an art of living.

Seeking to embody traditions of philosophy and social theory in everyday ethics, this book validates emotions and feelings as sources of knowledge and shows how the denigration of women has gone hand in hand with the denigration of nature. It queries post-structuralist traditions, that for all their insights into the fragmentation of identities, often sustain a distinction between nature and culture. The author argues that in a crisis of global warming we have to learn to listen to our bodies as part of nature and draws on Wittgenstein to shape embodied forms of philosophy and social theory that questions theologies to continue to shape philosophical traditions. In acknowledging our own vulnerabilities we question the vision of the autonomous and independent rational self that often remains within the terms of dominant white masculinities. This book offers different modes of self-work, drawing on psychoanalysis and embodied post-analytic psychotherapies. In doing so, it challenges, with Simone Weil, Roman notions of power and greatness that have shaped visions of white supremacy and European colonial power and empire.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, environmental philosophy. Social theory and sociology, ethics and philosophy, cultural studies, future studies, gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and philosophy and sociology as arts of living.