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

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.

• Acknowledgments.- Introduction.- Chapter 1 - Against the Empathetic Fallacy: On the Seriousness of the Moral Point of View.- Chapter 2 - Pain and the Other, and the Otherness of Pain.- Chapter 3 - Silence as Distance.-  Chapter 4 - Distancing, the Pandemic, and Our Tragic Condition.- Chapter 5 - The Limits of Sense and Transcendental Melancholy in the Philosophy of Love.- Chapter 6 - Conclusion.- References.- Index.