Forgiveness


Book Description

The first comprehensive philosophical book on forgiveness in both its interpersonal and political contexts.




Original Forgiveness


Book Description

In Original Forgiveness, Nicolas de Warren challenges the widespread assumption that forgiveness is always a response to something that has incited it. Rather than considering forgiveness exclusively in terms of an encounter between individuals or groups after injury, he argues that availability for the possibility of forgiveness represents an original forgiveness, an essential condition for the prospect of human relations. De Warren develops this notion of original forgiveness through a reflection on the indispensability of trust for human existence, as well as an examination of the refusal or unavailability to forgive in the aftermath of moral harms. De Warren engages in a critical discussion of philosophical figures, including Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Edmund Husserl, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean Améry, and of literary works by William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Simon Wiesenthal, Herman Melville, and Maurice Sendak. He uses this discussion to show that in trusting another person, we must trust in ourselves to remain available to the possibility of forgiveness for those occasions when the other person betrays a trust, without thereby forgiving anything in advance. Original forgiveness is to remain the other person’s keeper—even when the other has caused harm. Likewise, being another’s keeper calls upon an original beseeching for forgiveness, given the inevitable possibility of blemish or betrayal.




Forgiving Philosophy


Book Description

This book explores forgiveness as a philosophical matter. Responding to the curious omission of forgiveness in much of Western philosophy, it examines common themes and divergences on forgiveness in the works of Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Arendt. These writers understood forgiveness as a paradox—it must be contained to be given (Augustine), granted-yet-not-granted (Kierkegaard), and forgotten the moment it is given, as if never given at all (Arendt). Drawing on these insights, can forgiveness be then thought of as a hidden existential capacity and not as a magnanimous display of mercy? Can we imagine forgiveness as undoing the transgression we see, and secretly engaging with the imperceptible impossibility of undoing what has indeed been done?




After Injury


Book Description

After Injury explores the practices of forgiveness, resentment, and apology in three key moments when they were undergoing a dramatic change. The three moments are early Christian history (for forgiveness), the shift from British eighteenth-century to Continental nineteenth-century philosophers (for resentment), and the moment in the 1950s postwar world in which British ordinary language philosophers and American sociologists of everyday life theorized what it means to express or perform an apology. The debates that arose in those key moments have largely defined our contemporary study of these practices.




The Ethics of Forgiveness


Book Description

We are often pressed to forgive or in need of forgiveness: Wrongdoing is common. Even after a perpetrator has been taken to court and punished, forgiveness still has a role to play. How should a victim and a perpetrator relate to each other outside the courtroom, and how should others relate to them? Communicating about forgiveness is particularly urgent in cases of civil war and crimes against humanity inside a community where, if there were no forgiveness, the community would fall apart. Forgiveness is governed by social and, in particular, by moral norms. Do those who ask to be forgiven have to fulfil certain conditions for being granted forgiveness? And what does the granting of forgiveness consist in? We may feel like refusing to forgive those perpetrators who have committed the most horrendous crimes. But is such a refusal justified even if they repent their crimes? Could there be a duty for the victim to forgive? Can forgiveness be granted by a third party? Under which conditions may we forgive ourselves? The papers collected in the present volume address all these questions, exploring the practice of forgiveness and its normative constraints. Topics include the ancient Chinese and the Christian traditions of forgiveness, the impact of forgiveness on the moral dignity and self-respect of the victim, self-forgiveness, the narrative of forgiveness as well as the limits of forgiveness. Such limits may arise from the personal, historical, or political conditions of wrongdoing or from the emotional constraints of the victims.




Forgiveness and Remembrance


Book Description

The theme of Forgiveness and Remembrance is the complex moral psychology of forgiving and remembering in both personal and political contexts. It offers an original account of the moral psychology of interpersonal forgiveness and explores its role in transitional societies. The book also examines the symbolic moral significance of memorialization in these societies and reflects on its relationship to forgiveness.




Forgiveness and Love


Book Description

What is forgiveness? When is it appropriate? Is it to be earned or can it be freely given? Is it a passion we cannot control, or something we choose to do? Glen Pettigrove explores the relationship between forgiving, understanding, and loving. He examines the significance of character for the debate, and revives the long-neglected virtue of grace.




Forgiveness


Book Description

Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has only recently begun to receive his due from the English-speaking world, thanks in part to discussions of his thought by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Paul Ricoeur. His international readers have long valued his unique, interdisciplinary approach to philosophy’s greatest questions and his highly readable writing style. Originally published in 1967, Le Pardon, or Forgiveness, is one of Jankélévitch’s most influential works. In it, he characterizes the ultimate ethical act of forgiving as behaving toward the perpetrator as if he or she had never committed the action, rather than merely forgetting or rationalizing it—a controversial notion when considering events as heinous as the Holocaust. Like so many of Jankélévitch’s works, Forgiveness transcends standard treatments of moral problems, not simply generating a treatise on one subject but incorporating discussions of topics such as free will, giving, creativity, and temporality. Translator Andrew Kelley masterfully captures Jankélévitch’s melodic prose and, in a substantive introduction, reviews his life and intellectual contributions. Forgiveness is an essential part of that legacy, and this indispensable English translation provides key tools for understanding one of the great Western philosophers of the twentieth century.




Before Forgiveness


Book Description

In this book, David Konstan argues that the modern concept of interpersonal forgiveness, in the full sense of the term, did not exist in ancient Greece and Rome. Even more startlingly, it is not fully present in the Hebrew Bible, nor in the New Testament or in the early Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Holy Scriptures. It would still be centuries - many centuries - before the idea of interpersonal forgiveness, with its accompanying ideas of apology, remorse, and a change of heart on the part of the wrongdoer, would emerge. For all its vast importance today in religion, law, politics and psychotherapy, interpersonal forgiveness is a creation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Christian concept of divine forgiveness was fully secularized. Forgiveness was God's province and it took a revolution in thought to bring it to earth and make it a human trait.




Radical Forgiveness


Book Description

This is NOT just another book on forgiveness; this one provides the necessary tools to help you forgive profoundly, more or less instantaneously and with ease. First published in 1997, this 2nd Edition builds on the success of the first edition which has changed hundreds if not thousands of lives. The book will more than likely change your life. It will transform how you view your past and what is occurring for you in the present, especially where relationships are concerned. Unlike other forms of forgiveness, radical forgiveness is easily achieved and virtually immediate, enabling you to let go of being a victim, open your heart and raise your vibration. The simple, easy-to-use tools provided help you let go of the emotional baggage of the past and to feel the joy of living in total surrender to the process of life as it unfolds, however it unfolds. The result is vastly increased happiness, personal power and freedom.