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This volume brings together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on a topic of central importance, but which has otherwise tended to be approached from within just one or another disciplinary framework. Most of the essays contained here incorporate some degree of interdisciplinarity in their own approach, but the volume nevertheless divides into three main sections: Philosophical considerations; Humanities approaches; Legal, medical, and therapeutic contexts.

The volume includes essays by philosophers, medical practitioners and researchers, historians, lawyers, literary, Classical, and Judaic scholars. The essays are united by a common concern with the question of the human character of suffering, and the demands that suffering, and the recognition of suffering, make upon us.

Perspectives on Human Suffering

1. Introduction: Human Suffering - Jeff Malpas and Norelle Lickiss

I. Philosophical Considerations
2. Suffering and Forgiveness: An Heroic Journey - Andrew Brennan and Norva Lo
3. Levinas on Suffering - Andrew Benjamin
4. The Other Thing About Suffering - Lucy Tatman
5. Suffering, Compassion, and the Possibility of a Humane Politics - Jeff Malpas
6. 'Pathei Mathos': The Cognitive Value of Suffering - Gaetano Chiurazzi
7. 'Giving the World a More Human Face' - Human Suffering in African Thought and Philosophy - Thaddeus Metz
8. Suffering as Substantive and Subjective: Slavoj Zizek, Hannah Arendt, and the Body's Pain - Michael Mack

II. Humanities Approaches
9. The Suffering of Job: He is Every Person and No-one - Peta Pellach
10. The Meaning of Suffering: A Historian's View - Nicholas Tarling
11. Jewish Responses to Suffering - Paul Turner
12. Suffering and Ancient Therapy from Plato to Cicero - Dougal Blyth
13. Thinking with Philoctetes - Edith Hall
14. Historicizing Suffering - Wayne Hudson
15. The Politics of Suffering - Peter Sutton

III. Legal, Medical and Therapeutic Contexts
16. Some Aspects of Human Suffering and the Criminal Law - Sir Guy Green
17. Suffering and the Law: Its Meaning and Definition - Norchaya Talib
18. To Suffer with: The Poetry of Compassion - Jack Coulehan
19. Facing up to Suffering - Norelle Lickiss
20. Suffering Seeks a Voice - Frank Brennan
21. Dignity, Pain and Suffering - Daryl Pullman
22. Suffering and the Sleeplessness of Clinicians - Matthew Hamilton and Grant Gillett
23. The Selfsame Well: Human Suffering in Grief and Bereavement - Elizabeth A Lobb
24. Reflections on Compassion, Suffering and Occupational Stress - Mary Vachon
25. Insights from Neuroscience and Literature into Pain and Mental Suffering - Ross Mellick