Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life - Hardcover

Pritchard, Duncan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691259518 ISBN 13: 9780691259512

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A leading philosopher explains how risk-taking can help us live authentic and flourishing lives

We take risks every day―perhaps not the extreme, dangling-off-the-side-of-a-mountain kind of risks, but risks nonetheless, in decisions about careers, marriage, children, moving house, and other matters. Tempting fate is simply what we have to do from time to time in life. But how we should go about tempting fate in a reasonable way? In this illuminating book, philosopher Duncan Pritchard explains why risk-taking, even extreme risk-taking, can sometimes be both reasonable and admirable, and how it can play a crucial role in living an authentic life.

Using Alex Honnold’s famous free solo climb of El Capitan as a paradigm example of admirable risk-taking, Pritchard offers a completely new theory of risk, one that explains it in terms of fragility rather than probability. He shows how fragility can explain why skill and preparation are crucial to sensible risk-taking, even when the activity is unavoidably high risk. Fragility also makes clear that taking risks means riding one’s luck and why both risk and luck are vital to living an authentic and meaningful existence. Pritchard shows that his fragility theory of risk has practical implications for making sense of risk in law, arts, sports, and other domains. Tempting fate, in other words, is not merely thrill-seeking but essential for human flourishing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Duncan Pritchard is distinguished professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Epistemic Luck; Epistemological Disjunctivism; Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton); and Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691259518
• ISBN 13: 9780691259512
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar