The Long Life invites the reader to range widely from the writings
of Plato through to recent philosophical work by Derek Parfit,
Bernard Williams, and others, and from Shakespeare's King Lear
through works by Thomas Mann, Balzac, Dickens, Beckett, Stevie
Smith, Philip Larkin, to more recent writing by Saul Bellow, Philip
Roth, and J. M. Coetzee.
Helen Small argues that if we want to understand old age, we have
to think more fundamentally about what it means to be a person, to
have a life, to have (or lead) a good life, to be part of a just
society. What did Plato mean when he suggested that old age was the
best place from which to practice philosophy - or Thomas Mann when
he defined old age as the best time to be a writer - and were they
right? If we think, as Aristotle did, that a good life requires the
active pursuit of virtue, how will our view of later life be
affected? If we think that lives and persons are unified, much as
stories are said to be unified, how will our thinking about old age
differ from that of someone who thinks that lives and/or persons
can be strongly discontinuous? In a just society, what constitutes
a fair distribution of limited resources between the young and the
old? How, if at all, should recent developments in the theory of
evolutionary senescence alter our thinking about what it means to
grow old?
This is a groundbreaking book, deep as well as broad, and likely
to alter the way in which we talk about one of the great social
concerns of our time - the growing numbers of those living to be
old, and the growing proportion of the old to the young.
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