Critical Distance: Ethical and Literary Engagements with Detachment, Isolation, and Otherness

This book argues that no ethically appropriate relation to other human beings is possible unless we treat them as genuinely other. The authors provide reasons to be critical of various attempts, many of them popular in our contemporary (Western) culture, to encourage deeper attachment to and immersion into others’ lives and experiences. They defend the significance of the distance between human beings, criticizing exaggerated uses of, e.g., the concept of empathy and related concepts in academic as well as more popular ethical contexts, across a range of issues from the nature of ethical duty to the philosophy of love.

The chapters offer non-technical philosophical and cultural criticism through selected perspectives on the continuum between closeness and distance, exploring various aspects of ethically significant relations between human beings. This book thus appeals to a wide audience, especially researchers and students in different fields of the humanities, including philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies, by combining philosophical and literary methodologies in a humanistic examination of the value of distance. The book also argues that we have to be able to abstract from the concrete other in ethical relations, living in the normative and rational sphere of duty instead of emotional immersion.

Sami Pihlström is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Helsinki. He is currently the president of the Philosophical Society of Finland and of the William James Society. He is the author of more than twenty books (on, e.g., pragmatism, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophical anthropology, and transcendental philosophy). His recent monographs include Why Solipsism Matters (Bloomsbury, 2020), Pragmatic Realism, Religious Truth, and Antitheodicy: On Viewing the World by Acknowledging the Other (Helsinki UP, 2020), Pragmatist Truth in the Post-Truth Age: Sincerity, Normativity, and Humanism (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities (SUNY Press, 2022), Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion (Lexington, 2023), and Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy (Springer, 2023). 

Sari Kivistö is Professor of Comparative Literature and the director of the doctoral program in literary studies at Tampere University. Her research interests include, for example, epistemic vices, suffering and antitheodicy in literature, and Neo-Latin literature. Kivistö’s books include Neo-Latin Verse Satire, ca. 1500-1800. An Ethical Approach (Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2022), Lucubrationes Neolatinae. Readings of Neo-Latin Dissertations and Satires (Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2018), Kantian Antitheodicy. Philosophical and Literary Varieties (with S. Pihlström, Palgrave, 2016), Death in Literature (ed. with O. Hakola, Cambridge Scholars, 2014), The Vices of Learning. Morality and Knowledge at Early Modern Universities (Brill, 2014), and Medical Analogy in Latin Satire (Palgrave, 2009). 

Both authors are invited members of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.