The Philosophers' Gift
eBook - PDF

The Philosophers' Gift

Reexamining Reciprocity

  1. 256 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Philosophers' Gift

Reexamining Reciprocity

About this book

Winner, French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. When it comes to giving, philosophers love to be the most generous. For them, every form of reciprocity is tainted by commercial exchange. In recent decades, such thinkers as Derrida, Levinas, Henry, Marion, Ricoeur, Lefort, and Descombes, have made the gift central to their work, haunted by the requirement of disinterestedness.As an anthropologist as well as a philosopher, Hénaff worries that philosophy has failed to distinguish among various types of giving. The Philosophers' Gift returns to Mauss to reexamine these thinkers through the anthropological tradition. Reciprocity, rather than disinterestedness, he shows, is central to ceremonial giving and alliance, whereby the social bond specific to humans is proclaimed as a political bond. From the social fact of gift practices, Hénaff develops an original and profound theory of symbolism, the social, and the relationship between self and other, whether that other is an individual human being, the collective other of community and institution, or the impersonal other of the world.

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Yes, you can access The Philosophers' Gift by Marcel Hénaff, Jean-Louis Morhange in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Post-Structuralism in Philosophy. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. THE PHILOSOPHERS’ GIFT
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. CONTENTS
  6. Translator’s Preface
  7. Preliminary Directions
  8. 1. Derrida: The Gift, the Impossible, and the Exclusion of Reciprocity
  9. 2. Propositions I: The Ceremonial Gift—Alliance and Recognition
  10. 3. Levinas: Beyond Reciprocity—For-the-Other and the Costly Gift
  11. 4. Propositions II: Approaches to Reciprocity
  12. 5. Marion: Gift without Exchange—Toward Pure Givenness
  13. 6. Ricoeur: Reciprocity and Mutuality—From the Golden Rule to Agapē
  14. 7. Philosophy and Anthropology: With Lefort and Descombes
  15. 8. Propositions III: The Dual Relationship and the Third Party
  16. Postliminary Directions
  17. Acknowledgments
  18. Notes
  19. Bibliography
  20. Index