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 Žižek, 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.-.

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.