EAN: 9780691240596

LIFE IS SHORT - DEAN RICKLES GEBUNDEN

This brief book attempts to provide a 21st-century version of Seneca's classic essay  On the
Shortness of Life. Like Seneca  Rickles seeks to motivate readers to meditate on how they use
their time and offer some reasons why they mismanage this precious resource. Drawing on new
developments in the understanding of time  the self  and human agency  in philosophy 
psychology  neuroscience  and physics  Rickles's basic aim is to highlight the essential nature
of the limit provided by death and the ways in which this fact gives life its meaning. The book
will also point to a number of solutions (and potential pitfalls in these) aimed at using time
more wisely. Throughout the book the focus is on a pair of competing personality styles that
are found to be at the root of many of the problems Seneca unearthed  and can be associated
with philosophical stances on personal identity and theories of time. These styles  commonly
referred to in psychology as Puer and Senex are  respectively  the childish  present-focused
type and the rational  future-focused  type. These styles relate in a fundamental way to how an
individual reacts to being limited  whether by death or decision. The book will also deal with
themes such as the concept of immortality  diseases of time  such as the hyperbolic discounting
leading us to devalue our futures  and strategies for using the short life well. The book
concludes by showing that it is not life that has ultimate meaning but death  and this ultimate
limit is where life derives whatever meaning it will have--

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