Event Details
In midlife, the hardest problem to deal with is sometimes not failure, but suddenly becoming aware, amid the stability of a life that has fallen into place, of the harshness of life's finitude: possibilities shrink, the past cannot be rewritten, and the future is no longer infinitely open. In the steady routines of career, family, and responsibility, regret, repetition, and finitude grow all the more palpable. The disorientation comes not from failure, but from a weary sense of "Is this all there is?" How should we understand this predicament philosophically? And how can we learn to live with a finite life, closed-off choices, an irretrievable past, and the certainty of death?
On May 19, Kieran Setiya, Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will share from his book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton University Press), and engage in a dialogue with Yu Liu, Tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tsinghua University, on fundamental questions about reason, value, and the good life. Though it begins from the experience of midlife, the book is not written only for the middle-aged; instead, it uses the "midlife" moment to explore a situation that anyone may face.
