In a series of original and perceptive philosophical essays -- including those on "Birth and Death," "Virtue and Human Flourishing," 'The Need to Sleep," "Sex," "Truth and Reality," "Vanity and Destiny," and "The Fear of Death" -- the author reflects on the nature of morality and its relation to experience, on the individual mind and its place in philosophy, and on the strangeness of life itself. Drawing widely on literature and philosophy -- from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, D. H. Lawrence, and others -- Living Philosophy has some affinities with the philosophy practised by such figures as Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Cavell, and Peter Winch. Hamilton develops a way of approaching philosophy that opens up room not so much to answer the pressing questions of life as to deepen our sense of what those questions are.

Christopher Hamilton is Head of German and Philosophy at Bedales School, Hampshire

Introduction: A Personal View of Philosophy; Birth and Death; Virtue and Human Flourishing; Morality and Style; Truth and Reality; Wisdom; Relativism; Vanity and Destiny; Morality and Life; Sex; The Need to Sleep; The Fear of Death; Bibliography.