The Reflective Life: Living Wisely With Our Limits

by Valerie Tiberius

What can we do to live life wisely? You might think that the answer would be to think and reflect more. But this is not Valerie Tiberius's answer. On her view, when we really take account of what we are like - when we recognize our psychological limits - we will see that too much thinking and reflecting is bad for us. Instead, we need to think and reflect better. This means that we need to develop we need to care about things that will sustain us and give us good experiences, we need to have perspective on our successes and failures, and we need to be moderately self-aware and cautiously optimistic about human nature. Further, we need to know when to think about our values, character, and choices, and when not to. A crucial part of wisdom, Tiberius maintains, is knowing when to stop reflecting and get lost in the experience.

The Reflective Life also considers the issue of how to philosophize about how to live. A recent trend in moral philosophy has been toward what is sometimes called 'empirically informed ethics'. This methodology has not yet caught on in normative ethics, primarily because we cannot conclude anything about what ought to be the case from the facts about what is. Tiberius agrees that this leap should be avoided, but argues that empirical psychology can inform our philosophical theories in interesting ways.

Genres: Philosophy

236 pages, Hardcover

First published April 3, 2008

Reviews

[Jonathan Evans · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author was a guest on one of my favorite podcasts. She briefly touched on the subject matter of the book and I was motivated to track down and read the book. Unfortunately the writing style of the book was highly unaccessible. Even though the book I borrowed from the University of Michigan library had been on the shelf for 12+years I was the first to attempt to read it . How can I tell? My tears of frustration were the first to blemish the book's pages.