The Geometry of Desert Reprint edition by Kagan, Shelly (2015) Paperback

by Shelly Kagan

Excellent Book

Genres: Philosophy

Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Shelly Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale. After receiving his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1976, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1982, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Chicago before coming to Yale in 1995. He is the author of the textbook Normative Ethics, which systematically reviews alternative positions concerning the basic rules of morality and their possible foundations, and The Limits of Morality, which challenges two of the most widely shared beliefs about the requirements of morality. He is currently at work on The Geometry of Desert.

Reviews

[Matthew Adelstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shelly Kagan is a brilliant philosopher, but this book was far from his best. It was much too long, had far too many graphs, and spent enormous numbers of pages on relatively trivial questions, when it seems the views could have been sketched out and defended in only a few pages. I go away from this book feeling as if the knowledge I've gained is equivalent to what it would be if I'd read a SEP article, rather than spent many hours reading this gargantuan book.