A research project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
2020 – 2025
Eva-Maria Düringer (PI), Silvia Caprioglio Panizza (Research Fellow)
2020 – 2025
Eva-Maria Düringer (PI), Silvia Caprioglio Panizza (Research Fellow)
One might expect that every ethical theory accounts for the nature of suffering and our engagement with it – surprisingly, however, they do not. Until very recently suffering was a neglected topic, at least in analytic moral philosophy. This project contributes to overcoming this neglect. It asks three interrelated questions:
1.What is the nature of suffering?
2.How will it enrich our thinking about moral virtues and vices, if we think about them in reference to a life going badly, to suffering, instead of to a life going well, to flourishing?
3.What does it take to see suffering, both in ourselves and others, justly?
To answer these questions, we bring together the diversity of recent analytic accounts of suffering with thoughts on the nature of suffering found in continental philosophy, in particular Simone Weil, as well as animal ethics, Non-Western philosophy, and medical ethics. In thinking about suffering as a kind of “negative telos”, or even an absence of any telos, we draw on Neo-Aristotelian accounts and the Platonic views by Weil and Iris Murdoch. The latter emphasise the near impossibility of acknowledging the fact that our life is subject to necessity and contingency, and that the moral task we need to take on consists in practising just and loving attention to this telos-free reality. How such attention can be characterised, how it can be directed at suffering, and what such attention might do to the sufferer, are among the most central of our questions.
1.What is the nature of suffering?
2.How will it enrich our thinking about moral virtues and vices, if we think about them in reference to a life going badly, to suffering, instead of to a life going well, to flourishing?
3.What does it take to see suffering, both in ourselves and others, justly?
To answer these questions, we bring together the diversity of recent analytic accounts of suffering with thoughts on the nature of suffering found in continental philosophy, in particular Simone Weil, as well as animal ethics, Non-Western philosophy, and medical ethics. In thinking about suffering as a kind of “negative telos”, or even an absence of any telos, we draw on Neo-Aristotelian accounts and the Platonic views by Weil and Iris Murdoch. The latter emphasise the near impossibility of acknowledging the fact that our life is subject to necessity and contingency, and that the moral task we need to take on consists in practising just and loving attention to this telos-free reality. How such attention can be characterised, how it can be directed at suffering, and what such attention might do to the sufferer, are among the most central of our questions.
Project events
Publications
- Eva-Maria Düringer “gut für nichts: Murdoch über Teleologie und den Lohn der Tugend”, Sonderband Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, edited by Carsten Dutt, forthcoming 2025.
- Eva-Maria Düringer “Affliction”, in The Routledge Companion to Simone Weil, edited by Deborah Casewell and Christopher Thomas, forthcoming 2025.
- Eva-Maria Düringer "Like a Fly Against a Pane of Glass: Simone Weil in the Context of Contemporary Theories of Suffering", Labyrinth, 2023, 25 (1), pp. 157-175.
- Eva-Maria Düringer "Murdochian Self-Empathy", in Empathy's Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art, edited by Thomas Petraschka and Christiana Werner, Routledge 2023, pp. 103-118.
- Eva-Maria Düringer "Murdoch and Weil", in The Murdochian Mind, edited by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood, Routledge 2022, pp. 306-317.
- Eva-Maria Düringer "The Moral Virtue of Being Understanding", Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2021, 24 (4), pp. 917-932.
- Silvia Caprioglio Panizza "Simone Weil and Moral Philosophy", in The Routledge Companion to Simone Weil, edited by Deborah Casewell and Christopher Thomas, forthcoming 2025.
|
|
