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The first major consideration of old age in Western philosophy and literature since Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age , Helen Small ranges widely from Plato through to recent work by Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams and others, and from King Lear through Balzac, Dickens, Beckett, Stevie Smith, Bellow, Roth, and Coetzee. - ;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. - ;The Long Life is an ambitious and meticulously researched work that acknowledges the di.cult practical challenges and questions raised by the egreying ofWestern societyf 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.
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