The Gift of Touch

Traces Western ideas of corporeal bodies from Plato to contemporary feminist and postructuralist writings, with the purpose of reexamining the good, identified in Plato as that which gives authority to knowledge and truth.

The Gift of Touch is the third volume in Ross's ongoing examination of the Western philosophical tradition in ethical terms, from the standpoint of the good, giving rise to endless responsibilities, resisting the neutrality of being and truth. The first volume, The Gift of Beauty, explored the link between art and the good in the light of Nietzsche's revaluation of all values and the second volume, The Gift of Truth, explored the ways in which truth and knowledge answer to a responsibility beyond themselves, given from the good. This third book traces Western ideas for corporeal bodies from Plato to contemporary feminist and poststructuralist writings, understanding corporeal things throughout nature as heterogeneous and expressive, interpreted in ethical terms, in relation to histories of domination and resistance. At the heart of the book is a reexamination of the good, found in Plato as that which gives authority to knowledge and truth. The good gives being in abundance, understood in terms of endless responsibility, giving rise to an ethics of inclusion.

Stephen David Ross is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He is the author of The Gift of Beauty: The Good as Art and The Gift of Truth: Gathering the Good, as well as other books published by SUNY Press.