One Life to Lead : The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment - Samuel Scheffler

One Life to Lead

The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment

By: Samuel Scheffler

eBook | 11 February 2025

At a Glance

eBook


RRP $33.54

$30.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $7.75 with

 or 

Instant Digital Delivery to your Booktopia Reader App

Read on
Android
eReader
Desktop
IOS
Windows

It is a truism that each of us has one life to lead--yet we rarely ask what it means to lead a life. The answer may seem obvious, but leading one's life is actually a complex, multifaceted undertaking, which requires us to negotiate deeply puzzling aspects of our experience and overcome profound challenges to our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. In One Life to Lead, Samuel Scheffler develops an "attachment-sensitive" conception of what it means to lead a recognizably human life. In so doing, he reveals hidden complexities that are latent in our understanding of ourselves and our lives. One Life to Lead focuses special attention on two interrelated dimensions of our experience: the temporal and the interpersonal. Many of the puzzles and challenges we must negotiate in leading our lives concern the passage of time, which comprehensively 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. Scheffler's investigations of our temporal and interpersonal experience remind us that our lives unfold at a particular point in time and in a particular set of social circumstances. Although our capacity to view our lives in broader perspective is extremely important, we can neither eliminate nor undo our social and temporal specificity--but nor should we want to. We lead our lives, and can hope to lead good lives, not by systematically transcending ourselves or our attachments, as some traditions and thinkers urge, but by engaging with the world as we find it in our contingent historical circumstances. One Life to Lead is an original and rigorous work of philosophy that offers profound insights into some of the most fundamental questions of human life.

Read on
Android
eReader
Desktop
IOS
Windows

More in Philosophy

Fair Play - Steven E. Landsburg

eBOOK

$9.99

The Promise of Rest - Reynolds Price

eBOOK

Somewhere in the Night - Nicholas Christopher

eBOOK

Story of Philosophy - Will Durant

eBOOK

The Art of Power - Thich Nhat Hanh

eBOOK

$10.99