Kierkegaard Eve And Metaphors Of Birth

Kierkegaard, Eve and Metaphors of Birth

There has been a recent revival of interest in reading Kierkegaard as an ontologist, as a thinker who engages with questions about the kinds of entity or process that constitute ultimate reality. This new way of reading Kierkegaard stands alongside a revival of interest in ontology and metaphysics more generally. This highly original book concentrates on the claim that Kierkegaard focuses in part on ontological questions and on issues pertaining to the nature of being as a whole. Alison Assiter asserts that Being, for Kierkegaard, following Schelling, can be read in terms of conceptions of birthing—the capacity to give birth as well as the notion of a birthing body. She goes on to argue that the story offered by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety about the origin of freedom connects with a birthing body, and that Kierkegaard offers a speculative hypothesis, in terms of metaphors of birthing, about the nature of Being.

A New Theory of Human Rights

This book offers a new materialist thesis that focuses on the dynamic biological core of humans, shared with other animals and the rest of the natural world, to develop a radical theory of human rights. It therefore makes a unique contribution to literature and to academic and societal debates both on new materialisms and on human rights. Many on the political far right deride the concept of a human right. This has occurred in tandem with a growing contempt for the rule of law and for obligations to protect land or the environment, to recognize the rights of minorities, or even to respect the various mechanisms of democracy. On the other hand, ccontemporary ‘left-wing’ inspired literature has also rejected the concept of a human right as Enlightenment inspired and 'western’. This has gone hand in hand with a contestation of ‘essentialism’ and ‘universalism'. These theoretical positions have been variously critiqued as racist, sexist as well as Eurocentric. Drawing on metaphysics and ethics, with protagonists drawn from traditions across analytic and continental philosophy and feminist theory, Assiter challenges these critics to form a distinctive new materialist position. Most people – defenders and critics - take for granted that the concept of human rights and the universal view of humanity derive from the European Enlightenment. However, this bookdevelops a different story of its origin, from the earlier period of both Aristotle and the Zoroastrian Persian Empire, and locates the concept of a right partly in our biological core, yet challenges the assumption that this is constructed by language of any kind specifically including scientific discourse.

Kierkegaard Bibliography