Seeing Double

The world is never going to make complete sense to us, yet we find that conclusion almost impossible to accept. Can we live, and feel at home, in a world composed at best of incompatible fragments of meaning?

This is the theme that runs through this collection of essays by Raymond Geuss. Drawing on a characteristically wide range of insights from moral and political philosophy, history, and aesthetics, he addresses topics such as knowledge (of self, the world, and others), language, the visual and the auditory, authority, hope, and the success and failure of life projects. He argues that, to get by in our bewildering world, we must embrace the virtue of ‘double vision’: that is, immersing ourselves in and learning the ways of the culture surrounding us, even as we feel alienated from it. Together the essays explore some of the consequences of abandoning the idea of a unitary view of the world, while at the same time trying to avoid quietism.

Seeing Double is a compelling collection of work by one of the world’s most versatile and creative philosophers. Preface

1 Montaigne and the Essay
2 Rabelais and the Low Road to Modernity
3 Nietzsche’s Philosophical Ethnography
4 Autopsy and Polyphony
5 Speaking Well, Speaking Correctly
6 Succeed, Fail, Fail Better
7 Hope

Notes
Index

"This is a wonderful collection of essays covering a broad range of important topics. The title Seeing Double refers to a recurring theme in the book: the need for multiple perspectives. The essays all display Geuss�s hallmark combination of originality, boldness, insight, clarity of argument, erudition, and stylistic elegance. It would be hard to praise this collection too strongly."
Michael N. Forster, Bonn University

"Geuss invites his readers to converse with an eccentric tradition of European thinkers who refused to indulge the belief in a single standpoint from which the world must make sense. His collection is an invitation to us to wean ourselves from optimism and to cultivate recognition of the plurality and conflict of our embodied, social, and world-dependent existence as a first step toward a liveable future."
Katherine Harloe, School of Advanced Study, University of London

"The book has all the things that make Geuss's writing so splendid: the vast learning, the interest in widely different areas of culture, the dry wit. Many philosophers would be proud to have written even one of these essays. A whole collection of them is a very nice thing to have."
Philosophy in Review Raymond Geuss is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.