"What if human consciousness were not only a product of evolution but also its robust continuation--and the means by which we greet the unprecedented future? Amplifying the stakes of evolutionary theory, Evolving Toward the Other eloquently guides us on an astonishing adventure into who we may become if we take seriously our exposure to historical time. Everything we think we know about desire, imagination, intelligence, creativity, truth, freedom, responsibility, and forgiveness is transfigured by this profound journey. With discerning originality and poetic lucidity, Jerome Miller opens unexplored horizons for understanding the human place in the cosmos, while also confronting our fundamental choice--whether to embrace our evolution toward the other or to foreclose the future itself." -Ted Toadvine, Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute, The Pennsylvania State University "This is a bold, erudite, and ambitious piece of philosophical writing. It combines and probes a range of philosophical and intellectual traditions in order to produce a unique meditation on temporality, evolution, and human life. This impressive book touches on the most basic features of human existence; it is that rare combination of scholarly treatise and existential reflection. Miller''s conceptualization of a ''traumatological conception of time'' will be of interest to a range of thinkers." -Martin Shuster, Professor of Philosophy, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte "Jerome Miller offers a creative synthesis of two strands of thought that have typically been opposed to each other: Darwin''s theory of evolution and the emphasis in much Continental thought on an ethics open to "the Other.

" Levinas holds that "ethics is against nature" because responsibility for "the Other" requires overcoming the ruling principle of the life-world, the desire-to-be. Miller, to the contrary, situates human intelligence and judgment in "a robust conception of evolution" that treats historical time as "the ontological infrastructure of the cosmos and as always already opening it to the unprecedented future." And this makes room for a picture of human life as "a robust evolutionary drama" in which we can "evolve towards the good" by living in the only hope for the future worthy of "the evolutionary importance of persons": that, against all odds, "the flow of blood" unleashed by evil might become "a stream of love." Miller undoes philosophical pieties and speaks with prophetic piety." -Lawrence Vogel, Professor of Philosophy, Connecticut College "Jerome Miller''s book original and enlightening book, Evolving Toward the Other: The Evolutionary Significance of Human Persons, makes the case that human beings are capable of radical openness to a future whose outcome is not predetermined. By embracing astonishment, creative imagination, intelligence, and reason, we have the potential to open ourselves to others and to and to participate fully in a gift relationship with the world. We are also capable of withdrawing from otherness in harmful and destructive ways. In drawing on thinkers such as Plato, Lonergan, Heidegger, and Levinas while making his own original departures from each of their paths, Miller embodies the thesis that we are historical beings called to remain open to an unpredictable future.

" -Paulette Kidder, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University "In this thoughtful book, Miller explains why the best that is human is the capacity to be open to what, or who, defies our categories and to pursue their meaning in astonishment. He argues that this utmost personal capacity coheres with the unexpected novelty at the heart of biological evolution, while evolution transports time''s awesomely unprecedented nature that began with the origin of the cosmos. Miller''s understanding of people as capable of profound and non-narcissistic relationships is wonderful." -Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, author of Nussbaum''s Politics of Wonder: How the Mind''s Original Joy Is Revolutionary.