The Long Life - Softcover

Small, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019959256X ISBN 13: 9780199592562

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Synopsis

The Long Life invites the reader to range widely from the writings of Plato through to recent philosophical work by Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams, and others, and from Shakespeare's King Lear through works by Thomas Mann, Balzac, Dickens, Beckett, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, to more recent writing by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee.

Helen Small argues that if we want to understand old age, we have to think more fundamentally about what it means to be a person, to have a life, to have (or lead) a good life, to be part of a just society. What did Plato mean when he suggested that old age was the best place from which to practice philosophy - or Thomas Mann when he defined old age as the best time to be a writer - and were they right? If we think, as Aristotle did, that a good life requires the active pursuit of virtue, how will our view of later life be affected? If we think that lives and persons are unified, much as stories are said to be unified, how will our thinking about old age differ from that of someone who thinks that lives and/or persons can be strongly discontinuous? In a just society, what constitutes a fair distribution of limited resources between the young and the old? How, if at all, should recent developments in the theory of evolutionary senescence alter our thinking about what it means to grow old?

This is a groundbreaking book, deep as well as broad, and likely to alter the way in which we talk about one of the great social concerns of our time - the growing numbers of those living to be old, and the growing proportion of the old to the young.

About this title

About the Author:

Helen Small was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and studied at Victoria University of Wellington and at the University of Cambridge. She taught English Literature at the University of Bristol from 1993 to 1996, and since 1996 has been Fellow in English at Pembroke College, Oxford. From 2001 to 2004 she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, and was a Visiting Scholar at New York University. The Long Life was primarily written during that period.

Review:

"An exceptionally rich and trustworthy book, a model for disciplined, multidisciplinary work." --Modern Philology

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 019959256X
• ISBN 13: 9780199592562
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360