When everyone can make themselves heard, who cares to listen? How can we learn to pay attention without simply waiting for our turn to speak? What does it truly mean to be a good listener?
Miriam Rasch offers a philosophical and personal exploration of the ethics of listening, understanding it not as a passive act but as a relationship between the self and the world. This relationship is always mediated-by technologies such as algorithms and social media, by techniques like dialogue and attention, and by our bodies and surroundings.
Rasch investigates listening in different settings across four chapters. The first explores the effects of technology, the second examines dialogue and its pitfalls, the third considers questions of testimony and bearing witness to trauma and violence, and the fourth shifts focus to nonverbal sounds such as music and nature as a way to discover meaning.
Listening brings together philosophy of technology, ethics, and aesthetics with examples from film, literature, and art as well as reflections on listening as an everyday practice. This book recasts listening as an act of generosity-an active and open-ended process that unites giving and receiving.
| ISBN: | 9780231222334 |
| Publication date: | 22nd September 2026 |
| Author: | Miriam Rasch |
| Publisher: | Columbia University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 184 pages |
| Series: | No Limits |
| Genres: |
Philosophy of mind Ethics and moral philosophy Cognition and cognitive psychology Popular psychology Mind, body, spirit: meditation and visualization |
When everyone can make themselves heard, who cares to listen? How can we learn to pay attention without simply waiting for our turn to speak? What does it truly mean to be a good listener?
Miriam Rasch offers a philosophical and personal exploration of the ethics of listening, understanding it not as a passive act but as a relationship between the self and the world. This relationship is always mediated-by technologies such as algorithms and social media, by techniques like dialogue and attention, and by our bodies and surroundings.
Rasch investigates listening in different settings across four chapters. The first explores the effects of technology, the second examines dialogue and its pitfalls, the third considers questions of testimony and bearing witness to trauma and violence, and the fourth shifts focus to nonverbal sounds such as music and nature as a way to discover meaning.
Listening brings together philosophy of technology, ethics, and aesthetics with examples from film, literature, and art as well as reflections on listening as an everyday practice. This book recasts listening as an act of generosity-an active and open-ended process that unites giving and receiving.
Listening features in the following genres: Philosophy of mind, Ethics and moral philosophy, Cognition and cognitive psychology, Popular psychology, Mind, body, spirit: meditation and visualization
Listening is available in Hardback, Paperback
Listening was written by Miriam Rasch and published by Columbia University Press
Listening has 184 pages
Yes it is part of No Limits series
£15.29