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Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics by Maurice Hamington. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004, 181 pp., $30.00 hardcover.
Care ethics has been a focus of feminist ethics for the last twenty years. In this book, Maurice Hamington contributes to and significantly extends this discourse by showing that care is not just another moral theory; it is basic to human existence in that it is rooted in our bodies. Underlying care ethics are caring knowledge, including what is implicitly known to the body, and caring habits, which express that knowledge. These embodied experiences of caring, in turn, fuel the caring imagination, which enables us to care for those who are ordinarily distant from us. Hamington's key claim, then, is that care is best understood as a bodily reality more fundamental than any moral theory, and in fact as the foundation of morality itself.
The main strengths of the book are Hamington's clear and engaging presentation, his detailed accounts of the ways in which care is embodied, and his skillful syntheses of different philosophical schools of thought. The book begins with a helpful comparison between care and...