Peg O’Connor – författare

Moral philosophy, like much of philosophy generally, has been bedeviled by an obsession with seeking secure epistemological foundations and with dichotomies between mind and body, fact and value, subjectivity and objectivity, nature and normativity. These are still alive today in the realism-versus-antirealism debates in ethics. Peg O'Connor draws inspiration from the later Wittgenstein's philosophy to sidestep these pitfalls and develop a new approach to the grounding of ethics (i.e., metaethics) that looks to the interconnected nature of social practices, most especially those that Wittgenstein called “language games.” These language games provide structure and stability to our moral lives while they permit the flexibility to accommodate change in moral understandings and attitudes. To this end, O'Connor deploys new metaphors from architecture and knitting to describe her approach as “felted stabilism,” which locates morality in a large set of overlapping and crisscrossing language games such as engaging in moral inquiry, seeking justifications for our beliefs and actions, formulating reasons for actions, making judgments, disagreeing with other people or dissenting from dominant norms, manifesting moral understandings, and taking and assigning responsibility.

Moral philosophy, like much of philosophy generally, has been bedeviled by an obsession with seeking secure epistemological foundations and with dichotomies between mind and body, fact and value, subjectivity and objectivity, nature and normativity. These are still alive today in the realism-versus-antirealism debates in ethics. Peg O'Connor draws inspiration from the later Wittgenstein's philosophy to sidestep these pitfalls and develop a new approach to the grounding of ethics (i.e., metaethics) that looks to the interconnected nature of social practices, most especially those that Wittgenstein called “language games.” These language games provide structure and stability to our moral lives while they permit the flexibility to accommodate change in moral understandings and attitudes. To this end, O'Connor deploys new metaphors from architecture and knitting to describe her approach as “felted stabilism,” which locates morality in a large set of overlapping and crisscrossing language games such as engaging in moral inquiry, seeking justifications for our beliefs and actions, formulating reasons for actions, making judgments, disagreeing with other people or dissenting from dominant norms, manifesting moral understandings, and taking and assigning responsibility.

LIFE ON THE ROCKS is the first book to address addiction and recovery from a western philosophical perspective, offering a powerful set of tools sharpened over millennia. Aimed at treatment professionals as well as people newly sober or in long-term recovery, it introduces some of the core concepts and vexing questions of philosophy to help addicts and those affected by their addictions examine and perhaps transform the meaning they make of their lives. Without assuming any familiarity with philosophy, LIFE ON THE ROCKS illuminates issues all addicts and their loved ones face: self-identity, moral responsibility, self-knowledge and self deception, free will and determinism, fatalism, the nature of God and their relations to others. Addiction may be the starkest form of the most basic question a human faces: Shall I live or shall I die? If one chooses to live, then one must address the question of not only how to live, but how to live a good life. Addiction and recovery are, at their core, about the meaning of life. LIFE ON THE ROCKS is an indispensable guide to the deeply philosophical concerns at the heart of every addict's struggle.