One Life to Lead
The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23548633 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samuel Scheffler |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-02-26 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | One Life to Lead (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University PressNew York, NY (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/9780197754740.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W4406198715 |
| ISBN | 9780197754740 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
It is a truism that each of us has one life to lead. But we rarely ask what it means to lead a life, perhaps because the answer strikes us as obvious. In fact, though, leading one’s life requires that we negotiate some deeply puzzling aspects of our experience and overcome some profound challenges to our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. This book develops an “attachment-sensitive” conception of what it means to lead a recognizably human life. In so doing, it reveals some hidden complexities that are latent in our understanding of ourselves and our lives. The book focuses on two interrelated dimensions of our experience: the temporal and the interpersonal. Many of the puzzles and challenges we must negotiate concern the passage of time, which shapes and frequently unsettles our emotions, our attitudes, and our understanding of ourselves. Other questions concern our determination to form and sustain valuable personal and social attachments, even though doing so requires us to share authority with others and renders us vulnerable to grief, loss, and pain. The investigations of the temporal and interpersonal dimensions of our experience remind us that although our capacity to view our lives in broader perspective is extremely important, we cannot undo our social and temporal specificity. We lead our lives, and can hope to lead good lives, not by systematically transcending our selves or our attachments, as some traditions and thinkers have urged, but by engaging with the world as we find it.
Lead (geology) · Geology · History · Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology
| Citations per year | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |