The View from Here is a study of our must fundamental attitudes toward the past. The book explores the dynamics of affirmation and regret, tracing the connections of each to our ongoing attachments. The focus is on situations in which our attachments commit us to affirming events or decisions that we know to have been unfortunate or regrettable.

• 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

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.