Daniel Innerarity is a professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and a researcher at the Basque Foundation for Science (Ikerbasque). As a Doctor of Philosophy, he has carried out research in Germany, as a fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in Switzerland, Italy and France.

This book addresses the legal, philosophical and political question of an ethics of hospitality: an ethics engaged by the confrontation with what is different or new. The ethics of hospitality articulated here is based on the experience that human life is less a bundle of sovereign initiatives than a series of responses - often without our consent - to the world's invitations. As such, it is argued, this ethics means leaving open the possibility of being surprised rather than one trying to protect oneself from the irruption of the unexpected. By resorting to the idea of hospitality, the book thus offers a conceptual framework that exceeds law's inclination to close down the unpredictable: whether the stranger, the future - or, indeed, life itself.

Introduction: Paying attention to everything else. Part I. The domain of reception 1. The pathetic or the duty of events 2. The acceptance of people. Identity and committed hospitality 3. The moral spectacle: the pertinence of the absent 4. The chance of good life. The scandalous resemblance between happiness and fortune 5. Homo brevis. Ethics of duration, fatigue and the end 6. The meaning of present life. The particularity of the invited, or about awaiting the universal, uselessly Part II. Dimensions of pity 7. Xenology: prolegomena to the understanding of being stranger 8. Liberality. The virtue of pluralism 9. The time of the others. The human plurality as temporal diversity 10. Ethics and aesthetics of the natural 11. Poetics of compassion: the comprehension of the incomprehensible 12. An economy of hospitality