Preface
Acknowledgments
1. What Child Is This? The Practice of Personhood
2. The Architect and The Bee: Calling the Fetus into Personhood
3. Second Persons: The Work of Identity Formation
4. Ordinary Identity-Work: How We Usually Go On
5. Struggling to Catch Up: Challenges to Identity-Work
6. What and When to Let Go: Identities at the End of Life
7. What Does It All Mean?
References
Index
Hilde Lindemann is Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State
University. A Fellow of the Hastings Center and a past president of
the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, she is also a
former editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and the
Hastings Center Report. She has written widely on narrative
approaches to bioethics, feminist ethics, the ethics of families,
and the social construction of persons and their
identities.
"Holding and Letting Go is deceptively easy to read. The prose is
so delightful and the observations so incisive that it is difficult
to put it down. But a great deal of hard philosophical work is
being done in these pages, and there is intricate engagement with a
wide range of important contemporary positions. What emerges is a
rich, new structure for thinking about the nature of identity and
its relation to the kinds of ethical dilemmas and
difficulties we face every day. We are shown not just a compelling
and thought-provoking set of views about these issues, but a new
way of thinking about them, one that promises to shed some light
where things have
been notoriously opaque... Holding and Letting Go is a
sophisticated, tender-hearted, and clear-eyed view of persons that
provides original and compelling insights into what we are and why
it matters. We will be engaging with it for a long time to come."
--Hypatia
"In this book Hilde Lindemann shows us that good philosophy needs
good writing, but also that good writing can contribute to good
philosophy... it is how moral philosophy should be done." --Notre
Dame Philosophical Reviews
"In this wonderfully wise book Hilde Lindemann weaves stories into
theory to help us see how we weave stories into lives, and how
through these stories we hold each other in personhood-for good and
for ill. Her stories put flesh on the dry bones of much-discussed,
overly-abstracted philosophical problems; and in so doing she makes
a case for philosophical theorizing as an embodied, engaged,
emotionally and socially responsive practice."--Naomi Scheman,
University of Minnesota
"With her characteristic lucid and engaging prose, Hilde Lindemann
combines philosophical depth with richness of concrete detail in
her new book -- a book that significantly extends and deepens the
narrative approach to bioethics that she founded in her Damaged
Identities; Narrative Repair. In Holding and Letting Go, she
compellingly demonstrates how identity and personhood are
substantial achievements that often depend upon the help and
participation of others. This important book shows the complexity
of issues concerning personal identity, intimacy, and embodiment,
and their centrality to key debates in the ethics of health care
throughout the life
cycle."--Rebecca Kukla, Georgetown University
"Lindemann writes with great sensitivity to the complexities of
everyday identity work, and, one suspects, with no more and no less
precision than the practice of personhood allows."
-- The Philosophers' Magazine
"Lindemann manages to pull off that rarest of rare feats in
academic philosophical writing: to say something that is at the
same time philosophically insightful and universally relevant for
beings like ourselves..." -- Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Journal
"A valuable addition to the literature on personhood and identity.
Like most such texts, it recognizes the ambiguity of the concepts.
However, while other texts then try to clarify and fix the
ambiguity, Lindemann goes in another direction. She embraces it by
presenting and examining the many ways in which practices of social
connection, interaction, and disconnection shape, preserve, and
even damage an individual's personal and social identityELIn an age
where
the daily news contains stories of murder, rape, and persecution of
humans by humans for reasons related to an inability or
unwillingness to tolerate others for who they are, Lindemann
provides no
platitudes. Rather, she calls attention to the real,
rollup-your-sleeves phroenetic work of personhood that can only be
approached in steps and measured by effort. Her book resonates long
after the last page is turned." --International Journal of Feminist
Approaches to Bioethics
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