The seminar reads contemporary care ethics against the long history of philosophical reflection on sympathy, compassion, love, and concern for others. Since Gilligan and Noddings, care ethics has challenged the primacy of justice, impartiality, and autonomy in moral philosophy. Its central questions, however, are much older than the debate that made them prominent.
After establishing the contemporary position, we trace a genealogy: Aristotle on friendship and the Stoics on the circles of concern; Adam Smith on sympathy and the impartial spectator; Schopenhauer on compassion and his critics; Hegel's early conception of love and Kierkegaard's Works of Love; Heidegger's analysis of care as the being of Dasein. We return in the final sessions to care and justice, dependency, and the politics of care.
Four questions run through the semester:
- Does moral concern rest on feeling or on reason?
- Should care favour those closest to us, or extend to everyone alike?
- Does concern for another unite us with them, or does it require respecting their difference?
- How can we help others without taking their independence from them?
Readings are in English and German; translations are listed where they exist. No prior knowledge of care ethics is required. Readings marked primary are required for the session; the rest are recommended.
- Kursleiter/in: Johannes-Georg Schülein