The Long Life
Published on 20. September 2007
Book
Hardback
362 pages
978-0-19-922993-2 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
...a thought-provoking, sometimes fascinating, study of old age * Jeremy Tambling MLR * ...a landmark book and deserves to be widely read by all serious scholars of ageing. It is erudite, eclectic, carefully argued, ambitious in scope and modest in its claims...a superb contrbution to philosophy and literary criticism and will become an indispensable landmark for understanding longevity in those disciplines as well as in humanistic gerontolgy. * Thomas Cole Ageing and Society * ...a remarkable book...The range and the precision of Small's knowledge is extraordinary...an exceptionally rich and trustworthy book * Amelie Rorty, Modern Philology * The Long Life is an ambitious and meticulously researched work that acknowledges the difficult practical challenges and questions raised by the greying of Western society but calls upon us to become more serious in how we think about old age. * Michele Gemelos, The Review of English Studies * ...a thought-provoking and humane exploration of an unjustly neglected subject. * Henry Power The Cambridge Quarterly * Helen concludes that we will understand old age best when we view it not as a problem apart but always connected into larger philosophic and, I may add, moral considerations. She opened my eyes: I was blind and now I see. * Peter H. Millard, Age and Aging * a book philosophers, among others, should read, for it contains deftly handled engagements with some of the most formidable figures in their canon... But it also moves confidently among the classics of literature showing throughout how close reading is inseparable from hard thinking. * Stefan Collini, Times Literary Supplement * This is an ambitious, subtle and highly original study. * The Scotsman * The Long Life is an accessible, ground-breaking book and one 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 old to young. * Helen Peacocke, Oxford Times * Small... deserves to feel good, for she has argued tirelessly, written an impressively researched book, and commanded the interest of sceptics more than twice her age. * Frank Kermode, London Review of Books *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
708 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-922993-2 (9780199229932)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
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.
Content
Introduction ; 1. The Platonic Threshhold (Plato and Thomas Mann) ; 2. On Seeing the End (Aristotle and King Lear) ; 3. Narrative Unity of Lives (Epicureanism, the Narrative View, Saul Bellow) ; 4. The Power of Choosing (Prudential Life Planning, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith) ; 5. Where Self-Interest Ends (Derek Parfit and Balzac) ; 6. The Bounded Life (Adorno's Metaphysics, Dickens, Beckett) ; 7. Now or Never (Bernard Williams, J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth) ; 8. Evolved Senescence (Evolutionary theory, Michael Ignatieff's Scar Tissue) ; Conclusion