REVIEWS 85 Finally, while Andre’s book is essential reading for all who work in any fashion in health care, and for all who care about how health care works, it is not a readily teachable work, at least not in any conventional philosophy course in bioethics. For all of its sophisticated philosophical content, Bioet- hics as Practice would seem best taught in a social science oriented exami- nation of health care and of bioethics, or even better, a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary examination of such matters. Richard W. Momeyer, Department of Philosophy, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056; momeyerw@muohio.edu Strangers, Gods and Monsters Richard Kearney London and New York: Routledge, 2003, x + 294 pp, $80 h.c. 0-415-27257-2, $25 pbk. 0-415-27258-0 SHANNON SULLIVAN In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva argues that the foreign is within us and that “when we flee from or struggle against the foreigner, we are fight- ing our unconscious” (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 191). In a Kristevan spirit, Richard Kearney’s lively Strangers, Gods and Monsters investigates the experiences of extremity and alterity that strangers, scapegoats, aliens, monsters, devils, and gods represent. Like Kristeva, Kearney is interested in how the self is defined in terms of the other, and he is concerned about the projection of foreignness on to others that often results from an inabil- ity or refusal to recognize alterity within oneself. As Kearney argues, “[m]ost strangers, gods and monsters . . . are, deep down, tokens of fracture within the human psyche. They speak to us of how we are split between conscious and unconscious, familiar and unfamiliar, same and other” (1991, 4). Kearney adds, furthermore, that they present us with a choice of how we will respond to the experience of strangeness. Will we try to understand it, or will we try to refuse it by foisting it onto others? Kearney argues that philosophy has an important role to play in answer- ing this question. While Kristeva points to art, religion, and psychoanalysis as the three main avenues by which we can approach alterity, Kearney sug- gests a fourth way: philosophical understanding (6). As developed by Kearney, philosophical understanding allows for a rethinking of the rela- tionship between self and other such that neither is subordinated to the other. Kearney undertakes this rethinking by means of what he calls dia- critical hermeneutics (17). In contrast to both a romantic hermeneutics that merges the relata in question and a radical hermeneutics that posits their