Existential Ethics and the Philosophy of Historiography
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- ISBN 9789048567737
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Pallas Publications
- Publication City/Country: NL
- Product Form: Hardback
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What does it mean to bear responsibility for absent others when thinking, reading, and writing about them? The hermeneutic activities of reading and writing often involve ethical relations to absent people who are referred to and spoken about in our present lives. As the human world develops historically through orality and literacy, literary culture is one way in which connections to past and future generations can be deepened.
Scrutinizing responsibility in various exhortations to historicize, this book delves into the archaeological idea of prehistory, the anthropology of literacy, the ethics of memory and testimony, the hermeneutics and aesthetics of historical narration, Holocaust histories and the afterlife of evil deeds, the distinction between responsibility and guilt, and the morality of the human sciences. The aim is to clarify a personal and transgenerational responsibility toward absent others. The perspective is an existential ethics inspired by Emmanuel Levinas’s "ethics as first philosophy."
Winner of the 2026 ICHTH – INTH Best First Book Prize.
Natan Elgabsi is a Researcher in Philosophy at Åbo Akademi University. Elgabsi’s research is focused on the philosophy of history, existential and moral philosophy, the philosophy of reading and writing (hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrativism), memory studies, and the ethics of the human sciences. Elgabsi is co-editor of Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: A Cross-Cultural Approach (2023).
