Epiphanies

Sophie Grace Chappell has been Professor of Philosophy at the Open University since 2006, and Executive Editor of The Philosophical Quarterly since 2021. Her books include Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom (Macmillan, 1995), Understanding Human Goods (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), The Inescapable Self (Orion, 2005), Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (Hackett, 2005), Ethics and Experience (Acumen, 2009), Knowing What to Do (Oxford University Press, 2014), Epiphanies (Oxford University Press, 2022), A Philosopher Looks At Friendship (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and Trans Figured: How to survive as a transgender person in a cisgender world (Polity Press, 2024). She is a published poet (Songs For Winter Rain, Ellipsis Imprints 2021, and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Ellipsis Imprints 2022) and an active mountaineer, mainly in Scotland.

Sophie-Grace Chappell's exuberantly insightful essay makes a deeply persuasive case for re-setting the terms of moral philosophy. Chappell is interested in our ability to be interrupted. Epiphany, by definition, can't be normalized; but we can work at sustaining and reinforcing a culture that better understands that we are always becoming different subjects. The task is to allow the epiphany to form and educate as well as shock, so that our sense of the unseen dimensions beyond our localized perspective gradually alters how we see our world.

• 1: Introducing epiphanies 2: If not moral theory then what? 3: Encounters with values 4: What is it like to be a human being? 5: Soul Food: experience, art, and psychic nutrition 6: Epiphanies and other people 7: Ethical experience and other peop 8: Religion, Relativism, and the New Republic