Overview

C.S. Lewis was moaning over lunch to Owen Barfield. Lewis referred to philosophy as a 'subject'. 'It wasn't a subject to Plato', said Barfield. 'It was a way'. That is how the ancients saw it: as a search for practical wisdom wisdom that would enable humans to live as they should. That would be a very unfashionable view today. Philosophy, in the modern academy, is typically just a subject: a subject to be taught and talked about from nine to five, and then left behind when the real business of life starts. Lawyers, who seek to regulate the whole of human life, in all its complexity and glory and messiness, cannot leave their philosophical presumptions at the office when they come home. If they are practitioners they are involved in brokering uneasy compromises between individual freedom and societal thriving. One would have hoped that the lawyers and the philosophers would have something to say to one another. Yet often they share no common language or interest. This book is an attempt to get them talking. It is also an indictment of the way that the Academy in the fields both of philosophy and law conducts itself. The Academy is often characterised by presumption, intellectual cowardice, conservatism, envy and downright nastiness. No wonder little that is done there spills over into the real world. The book is a series of essays which, between them, cover many of the most pressing and foundational questions of our day and any day: The state of the Academy, religion and metaphysics, epistemology and the right use of intuitions, universal mind, quantum entanglement and causation, identity, freedom, human value and disability, genetics, animals, aliens, sexual ethics, abortion and other questions of reproductive ethics, the merits and demerits of culture, Brexit, the challenges of technology, research ethics, pandemic ethics, consent to medical treatment, end of life decision-making, environmental ethics, and the business of the law and its relationship to ethics. Behind them all are the most important questions of all: What sort of creatures are we? And how should we live?

Full Product Details

9781839996238

Table of Contents

Reviews

This book positively fizzes with intellectual firepower. Witty, subversive and a delight to read, the chapters cover a huge range of topics in relation to philosophy and the law, always with a deep sense of what it means to be a fully embodied human being with a rich embeddedness in life. — Dr Iain McGilchrist, Author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. Snappy, witty and insightful. This book offers fascinating observations on law, ethics and how to be a human being. Often provocative, always stimulating, Foster encourages us to break free from the binds of modern life and set ourselves free. — Jonathan Herring, DM Wolfe-Clarendon Fellow in Law, Exeter College, University of Oxford. This is a funny, insightful, provocative and always interesting series of vignettes on a broad range of issues. It covers medical law, bioethics and many topics beyond, but consistently leaves the reader wanting to read ‘just one more’ chapter. — Professor José Miola, Chair in Health Law and Deputy Head of School, Leicester Law School, University of Leicester.

Author Information

Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford; a member of the Oxford Law Faculty; and a practicing barrister. His books include the New York Times bestseller, Being a Beast. He has been involved as a barrister in many of the crucial cases in medical law, including the assisted suicide litigation in the U.K. Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights.

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