1st Edition

Existential Ethics and the Philosophy of Historiography Transgenerational Life and Memory in Literary Culture

By Natan Elgabsi Copyright 2026
248 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

Acknowledgements, Note on Translations and Transliterations, Preface, "Always Historicize!": Discovering Responsibility in Literary Culture 1. Prehistoric Time, Preliterate Mind: Anthropological Violence between Writing and History 2. Bearing Witness to Absent Others: Toward an Existential Ethics of Reading and Writing 3. Historiography as a Graveyard in the Letters: From Reification to Responsible Commemoration 4. Aesthetics and Hermeneutics: Narrating Stories About the Past 5. The Suffering of Real People: An Ethical Critique of Narrative Aesthetics 6. What is Responsibility? Ethical, Existential, and Transgenerational Dimensions 7. A Judgment of Evil Deeds: Posterity’s Interpretation and the Afterlife of Events, To Be a Reader of Other Generations, List of References, Index.

Biography

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).