Customer Reviews

A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice

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I read this book on basis of positive book reviews and I can only agree with those recommendations. Prof. Gaita as a professional philosopher deals with profound yet everyday occurrences and issues of human life, as the title also suggests: 'thinking about love and truth and justice'. This book deals with morality, concepts of good and evil and what occurs in human lives with intelligence, subtlety and compassion. He discusses, inter alia, the Holocaust, racism, and Australian Aboriginals. He points out that other people are treated as sub-humans only when there is a denial of the common humanity with the other. And these are issues on what occurs in human lives that every generation has to face and think about anew. I particularly liked his explanation of our relation to other, the notion that our sense of reality of others is partly conditioned by our vulnerability to them, the realisation of what it means to wrong them. Remorse is that realisation, and it is interdependent with a definite (and innate?) concept of evil. Grief, when it is not self-indulgent, is a heightened form of the awareness of another, a pained realisation of the independent reality of those we have lost. According to Gaita, it is astonishing that there could be such a state as guilt and suffering as remorse, with as a counterpart the wonder that other human beings could matter so much to us.

It is challenging, moving, and certainly not an easy book to read, and i do not pretend I always fully could follow the reasoning. But then, i did not expect it to be easy. In fact, I would have been suspicious if that would have been the case. The approach is different from e.g. the American philosopher R. Rorty and i found it as enlightening. Recommended!

The writer is confused. He takes opposites and tries to mix them, murder and love, truth and falsehood, religion and atheism. He actually thinks that homicide can be love. He is a very "religious" philosopher who wants to use the language of Christianity, which he claims to be powerful yet untrue. He thinks public servants have to lie to us. My impression is that he confuses students.

Despite having the title and presumably the tax-payer funded salary of a professor, this person cannot write English. When an intelligible sentence occasionally emerges, it turns out upon examination to be a cliche or a tautology. A disgraceful waste of trees and time.