University of South Carolina Prof. Jennifer A. Frey reviews Prof. Kiernan Setiya’s new book “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way” for The Wall Street Journal. Frey writes that Setiya's analysis "combines philosophical arguments and personal reflections on his own experience. He offers this in the hope that it will help readers better understand their own suffering and perhaps ease the weight of it."
Writing for The Guardian, Prof. Kieran Setiya explores the pursuit of happiness. “What, then, should we strive for? Not happiness or an ideal life, but to find sufficient meaning in the world that we are glad to be alive, and to cope with grace when life is hard,” writes Setiya. “We won’t achieve perfection, but our lives may be good enough.”
In a review for The New York Times, University of Bonn Prof. Irina Dumitrescu spotlights Prof. Kieran Setiya’s new book “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way” Dumitrescu writes: “Setiya’s main goal is not to describe how things should be; in his view, given that there is much in life that makes us miserable, and that we can neither change nor ignore, we might as well find ways of dealing with the reality.”
In his new book, “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way,” Prof. Kieran Setiya “aims to show how living well and hardship can go together,” reports The Economist. “Attentive readers of this humane, intelligent book will come away with a firmer grasp and better descriptions of whatever it is that ails them or those they cherish.”
Boston Globe reporter Kate Tuttle spotlights Prof. Kieran Setiya’s new book, “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way,” which provides “a road map for thinking about life through trials both mundane and catastrophic.” Says Setiya: “You can’t really approach life without hope. The question isn’t really whether we should hope or whether hope is good, it’s always what should we hope for.”
Los Angeles Times book critic Bethanne Patrick spotlights Prof. Kieran Setiya’s new book“Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.” Patrick writes that Setiya’s book demonstrates how “philosophy contains equipment that can help you survive and find renewed hope, if you know how to use it.”
Prof. Agustín Rayo ’01, dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, speaks with The Tech about his goals for his time as dean, the importance of an education in the humanities, arts and social sciences, and his plans for advancing the school’s DEI efforts. “The humanities, arts, and social sciences are crucial to understanding the human condition and our complex social, political, and economic institutions,” says Rayo. “MIT’s SHASS classes help develop powerful career, leadership, and problem-solving skills.”
Bloomberg reporter Ben Holland spotlights “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines” – a new book written by Prof. David Autor, Prof. David Mindell and Elizabeth Reynolds PhD ’10 – about the future of job mobility and social safety nets in the United States.
Prof. Kieran Setiya talks with Kate Kent of Wisconsin Public Radio about what we can learn about ourselves and our world from this hard year.
Prof. Emerita Judith Jarvis Thomson, known for her work creating “new fields of inquiry in philosophy through her writings on abortion and a moral thought experiment that she named the ‘Trolley Problem’,” has died at age 91, reports Alex Taub for The New York Times. Taub notes that Thomson “wrote some of the most influential papers in contemporary American philosophy” and “made her imagination her most powerful intellectual tool.”
Prof. Brad Skow speaks with WCVB-TV’s Chronicle about the concept of time and the “block universe” theory of time, which states that time does not pass by but is instead part of the larger fabric of the universe. “The future is a place just like Australia,” says Skow. “Australia is far away spatially and the future is also far away temporally.”
Writing for The New Yorker, Prof. David Kaiser contrasts a new study in Nature, which concludes that “if human will is free, there are physical events… that are intrinsically random, that is, impossible to predict,” with the 19th century writings of Stephen Freeman, who argued that, “human consciousness and our perception of free will must be subject to chains of causation.” The researchers, says Kaiser, “turned Freeman’s formulation on its head.”
In this 5-minute read for Fast Company, Prof. Kieran Setiya discusses the common “sense of repetition and futility” that comes in middle age. “We should not give up on our worthwhile goals,” writes Setiya. “But we should meditate, too, on the value of the process. It is no accident that the young and the old are generally more satisfied with life than those in middle age.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Eric Felten writes about Prof. Kieran Setiya’s new book on midlife crises. Felten notes that Setiya, “hopes to lift sufferers out of this dip and help them flourish by conveying the insights of modern philosophy.”
In an article for The New York Times, Prof. Kieran Setiya writes that, in his view, living in the present means appreciating activities that cannot be completed and are not incomplete. “If projects are all we value, our lives become self-subversive, aimed at extinguishing the sources of meaning within them,” he explains.