Reflections on How We Live - Annette C. Baier

As Annette Baier herself notes in her Preface, this book is about ethics in a very broad sense. The sixteen separate chapters, some of which have been previously published, are more like the essays of old than like typical present‐day journal articles. The style is relaxed, in some cases even rambling or impressionistic, but some distinctive theses are defended in interesting ways. Rather than try to review the separate chapters, I shall focus on a couple of the main themes or theses. But a representative list of chapter titles (which should give a sense of the book's breadth) might include ‘The Rights of Past and Future Persons’; ‘Can Philosophers Be Patriots?’; ‘Getting in Touch with Our Own Feelings’; ‘Sympathy and Self‐Trust’; ‘How to Lose Friends: Some Simple Ways’; and ‘Other Minds: Jottings towards an Intellectual Self‐Image’. I should also mention that the historical focus is not just on Hume (which one should expect from the self‐acknowledged Humean, p. 210), but on such diverse intellectual figures as Descartes, Mill, Rorty, Kant and Freud

Art · Epistemology · Feeling · Focus (optics) · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Style (visual arts) · Sympathy · Ethics in medical practice · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Psychology · Social Psychology