Ebook: The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature

In The Ethics of Theory, Robert Doran offers the first broad assessment of the ethical challenges of critical theory across the humanities and social sciences, calling into question the sharp dichotomy typically drawn between the theoretical and the ethical, the analytical and the prescriptive.
Individual chapters discuss the debate between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss over the ethical import of history; the “ethical turns” of Foucault and Derrida; the ethical ideal of Richard Rorty's “literary culture”; Hayden White's ethical historiography; the ethics of “conversion” in Sartrean existentialism and René Girard's theory of mimetic desire; the ethical humanism of Erich Auerbach's philology and Edward Said's postcolonial theory.