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The book is a drolly pessimistic and vaguely misanthropic account that gives it a unity of voice, of view, and of several interlaced themes: the scarcity of good, that most of happiness comes in the morally questionable form of Schadenfreude, or is experienced mostly as relief that some expected bad thing did not materialize. It deals extensively with those tinges of ominousness that accompany good luck, and the related widespread belief, or feeling in the gut, that people’s mere desires and wishes provoke the gods to thwart their wishes. Are good things subject to a law of conservation, so that they must always be paid for and sum out at just about zero or less? Why is there no scarcity, in contrast, in the economy of evil? Certain topics the author can never seem to avoid make encores: revenge and getting even, paying back what one owes, competitiveness, humiliation, and disgust with human embodiment. These large themes will be spiced with particular attention to killing messengers bearing both good and bad tidings, the decline of everything (including the author’s mind and body), an occasional eye-gouging, until people face what it means to eat at the table of one’s lord as a historical and religious matter from texts ranging from the Bible to medieval matter, right up to issues of the narcissistic present.

This is a study of the unlikely “career” of anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. Anxiety is an affect, something more subtle, sometimes more persistent, than an emotion or a passion. It lies at the intersection of embodiment and cognition, sensation and emotion. But anxiety also runs like a red thread through European thought, beginning from receptions of Kant’s transcendental project. Like a symptom of the quest to situate and give life to the philosophical subject, like a symptom of an interrogation that strove to take form in European intellectual culture, angst (from anxiety to anguish) passed through Schelling’s Romanticism into Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, until it was approached existentially by Kierkegaard. Nietzsche situates it in the long history of producing an animal able to promise. Its returns in the twentieth century allow us to grasp the connection between phenomenology’s exploration of passivity, followed by interpretations of the human reality in a world and open to a call that it can hardly assume. The study thus begins with Kant; it probes late idealism and Romanticism, the metaphysical vitalism that flickered with Schopenhauer, the aesthetics and religious senses of angst in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It turns to three avatars of anxiety in the evolving psychoanalysis before exploring the return to rationalism and formalism in twentieth-century phenomenology, followed again by efforts to resituate human beings in world and body as well as, significantly, before the anxiogenic “other.”

Empiricisms reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European philosophy and comparatively. It traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. A richly detailed account in Part I of history’s empiricisms establishes a context in Part II for reconsidering the work of the so-called radical empiricists—William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is “radical” about their work is to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. Empiricisms also sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other. Empiricism is more multi-textured than philosophers tend to assume when we explain it to ourselves and to students. One purpose of Empiricisms is to recover the neglected context. A complementary purpose is to elucidate the value of experience and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.

Americans today don’t trust each other and their institutions as much as they used to. The collapse of social and political trust arguably has fueled our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. But is the decline in trust inevitable? Are we caught in a downward spiral that must end in war-like politics, institutional decay, and possibly even civil war? This book argues that American political and economic institutions are capable of creating and maintaining trust, even through polarized times. Combining philosophical arguments and empirical data, the author shows that liberal democracy, markets, and social welfare programs all play a vital role in producing social and political trust. Even more, these institutions can promote trust justly, by recognizing and respecting our basic human rights.

On Being and Becoming offers a new approach to existentialist philosophy and literature, as responding to competing demands for universal truth and the defense of the irreducible singularity of the individual. On Being and Becoming traces the heterogeneity of existentialist thinking beyond the popular wartime philosophers of the Parisian Left Bank, demonstrating their critical dependence on sources from the nineteenth century and their complements in modernist works across the European continent and beyond. While quintessentially modern, existentialism inherits ideas of the past and anticipates challenges of the present. Despite its individualism, existentialist attention to the human self is related to conceptions of world, others, the earth, and the more encompassing concept of being. The predominance of ideas of authenticity, individuality, and self-determination makes any existentialist manifesto self-contradictory, while existentialist thinkers above all wanted to make their philosophy relevant to concrete human existence as it is lived. Prevailing models of existential authenticity life tend to overlook the rich diversity of its prospects, which, as this volume shows, involve not only anxiety, absurdity, awareness of death and of the loss of religious reassurances, but also hope, the striving for happiness, and a sense of the transcendent—all of these grounded our human capacity to create meaning. In spite of the diversity of existentialism, all of its thinkers recognize the self as becoming, and recognize the courage and creativity human individuality demands. On Being and Becoming elaborates pragmatic and philosophical relevance of existentialism for being human in the contemporary world.

Philosophies of Gratitude is a study of gratitude as a philosophical concept. It explores what philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have said about gratitude, and examines what role the idea of gratitude has played in their philosophies. It also looks at the three primary ways we think about gratitude—as an emotion we feel in response to a gift or benefit, as an act we perform to express our thankfulness, and as a virtuous disposition in which we are ready to be grateful to the world we inhabit. Like love and trust, gratitude is a way we react to other people in our lives, sometimes for who they are (lovable or trustworthy) and sometimes for what they do (act benevolently toward us). It is a way we feel and act toward others. It is a primary way we situate ourselves in relationships. Philosophies of Gratitude examines key historical moments when gratitude was an important philosophical concept—in classical antiquity, the early modern era, and the Enlightenment—in order to discover what gratitude meant for those who produced our fundamental Western notions of ethics. It then studies the forms gratitude assumes—as a feeling, act, disposition—to discern what role our emotions play in our ethical responses to the world. Finally, the book assesses what we can say about ingratitude as a response that usually strikes us as a moment when a human being fails to act morally, but may also sometimes indicate a deeper kind of ethical stand against injustice.

What is a fair income distribution? The empirical literature seems to assume that equal income would be fair, but the equal income answer faces two objections. First, equal income is likely to be inefficient. This book sets aside efficiency concerns as a downstream consideration; it seeks to identify a fair distribution. The second objection—pointed out by both leftist political philosopher G. A. Cohen and conservative economist Milton Friedman—is that equal income is unfair to the hardworking. Measuring labor burdens in order to adjust income shares, however, is no easy task. Some philosophers and economists attempt to sidestep the measurement problem by invoking the envy test. Yet a distribution in which no one prefers someone else’s circumstances to her own, as the envy test requires, is unlikely to exist—and, even if it does exist, the normative connection between the envy test and fairness has not been established. The Solidarity Solution provides a novel answer: when someone claims that her situation should be improved at someone else’s expense, she must be able to give a reason that cannot be rejected by a free and equal individual who regards everyone else as the same. Part I develops the solidarity solution and shows that rigorous distributive implications can be derived from a relational ideal. Part II uses the solidarity solution to critique the competing theories of Ronald Dworkin, Philippe Van Parijs, and Marc Fleurbaey. Finally, part III identifies insights for the gender wage gap and taxation.

Frege is widely regarded as having set much of the agenda of contemporary analytic philosophy. As standardly read, he meant to introduce—and make crucial contributions to—the project of giving an account of the workings of (an improved version of) natural language. Yet, despite the great admiration most contemporary philosophers feel for Frege, it is widely believed that he committed a large number of serious, and inexplicable, blunders. For, if Frege really meant to be constructing a theory of the workings of (some version of) natural language, then a significant number of his stated views—including views that he claimed to be central to his philosophical picture—are straightforwardly wrong. But did Frege mean to be giving an account of the workings of language? Frege himself never actually claimed to be doing this. Taking Frege at his Word offers an interpretation that is based on a different approach to his writings. Rather than using the contributions he is taken to have made to contemporary work in the philosophy of language to infer what his projects were, Taking Frege at his Word gives priority to Frege’s own accounts of what he means to be doing. The upshot is a very different view of Frege’s project. One might suspect that Frege’s writings would have purely antiquarian interest. But this would be a mistake. The final two chapters show that Frege offers us new ways of addressing some of the philosophical problems that worry us today.

Current forms of incarceration in the U.S. and U.K. are morally problematic in ways that are antithetical to the values and principles of liberal democracy. While indicating those morally problematic features the book defends the basic political and legal culture of the U.S. and U.K. A significant remaking of the political order is not needed for the required reforms of incarceration to be made. Greater faithfulness to the values and principles of liberal democracy could be adequate for such reforms. It is crucial to make those reforms because of the ways prisoners are currently being harmed, rendering many of them incapable of reintegrating successfully into civil society. The liberal order makes a dynamic, pluralistic civil society possible, and participating in civil society gives people a reason to value the liberal order. That relation is weakened by penal practices that diminish the agential capacities of offenders and fail to respect them as members of society. The book explores the relation between criminal justice and justice more comprehensively understood, highlighting the distinctive elements of criminal justice. It explains the role of desert in criminal justice and why criminal justice needs to be distinguished from distributive justice. Criminal justice includes a retributivist conception of punishment, one in which desert, proportionality, and parsimony are centrally important. A retributivist conception of punishment most effectively respects the voluntariness and accountability of agents in ways well suited to a liberal political order. The account examines misinterpretations of retributivism and highlights weaknesses of consequentialist approaches to sanction.

This is a work in moral philosophy and its ambition is to contribute to a renewed understanding of moral philosophy, the role of moral theory, and the relation between moral philosophy and moral life. It is motivated by the belief that the lack of a coherent answer to the question of the role and status of moral philosophy and the theories it develops, is one of the most important obstacles for doing work in moral philosophy today. The first part of the book untangles various criticisms of the dominant view of moral theories that challenges the explanatory, foundational, authoritative, and action-guiding role of these theories. It also offers an alternative understanding of moral theory as descriptions of moral grammar. The second part investigates the nature of the particularities relevant for an understanding of moral life, both particularities tied to the moral subject, her character, commitments, and moral position, and particularities tied to the context of the subject, her moral community and language. The final part marks a return to moral philosophy and addresses the wider question of what the revised conception of moral theories and the affirmation of the value of the particular mean for moral philosophy by developing a descriptive, pluralistic, and elucidatory conception of moral philosophy. The scope of the book is wide, but its pretensions are more moderate, to present an understanding of descriptive moral philosophy which may spur a debate about the status and role of moral philosophy in relation to our moral lives.