The View from Here

R. Jay Wallace is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (1994), Normativity and the Will (OUP, 2006), and numerous papers on moral psychology, the theory of practical reason, the philosophy of responsibility, and other topics in philosophical ethics.

• TABLE OF CONTENTS ; Acknowledgments ; Chapter One: Introduction ; Chapter Two: Looking Backward (with Feeling) ; 2.1 "For Sorrow There is No Remedy." ; 2.2 Regret and Agency ; 2.3 Preferences about the Past ; 2.4 Regret and Affirmation ; Chapter Three: Affirming the Unacceptable ; 3.1 The Young Girl's Child ; 3.2 Affirmation and Justification ; 3.3 Mixed Feelings ; 3.4 Meaning, Disability, and Politics ; Chapter Four: Luck, Justification, and Moral Complaint ; 4.1 Williams' Gauguin ; 4.2 Affirming One's Life ; 4.3 Affirmation, Justification, and Morality ; 4.4 Deep and Shallow Ambivalence ; Chapter Five: The Bourgeois Predicament ; 5.1 Meaning and its Conditions ; 5.2 Obstacles to Affirmation ; 5.3 The Bourgeois Predicament ; 5.4 Redemption, Withdrawal, Denial ; Chapter Six: A Somewhat Pessimistic Conclusion

This interesting, careful and occasionally outrageous book explores the complex interaction and competition between the attitudes of affirmation and regret that are almost inevitable as we look back on our lives and celebrate of deplore the conditions and choices that have made us what we are - that underlie our successes and failures, and our personal attachments. R. Jay Wallace's aims are very broad and his conclusions radical, but he begins by examining closely several examples of the phenomenon, real and imaginary, that are already familiar from recent philosophical literature.