Written for philosophers as well as general readers interested in social and moral issues, Mapping Responsibility is a thoughtful exploration of the ambiguous terrain of moral responsibility. As a philosophical idea, responsibility poses vexing questions: What does it mean to be a responsible person - that is, one who is justly held accountable and possibly punishable for an action? In exploring this and other important questions, author Herbert Fingarette employs an interdisciplinary range of ideas. He uses the theoretical standpoints of moral philosophy, moral psychology, and psychoanalytic psychology and also taps into legal scholarship on criminal justice to discuss retribution, punishment, and the state.

No one who reads this book will ever again think of their own death in the same way.

Fingarette faces up to the reality of death and demolishes some popular errors in our thinking about death. He examines the metaphors which mislead us: death as parting, death as sleep, immortality as the denial of death, and selflessness as a kind of consolation.

He thinks through some of the more illuminating metaphors: death as the end of the world for me, death as the conclusion of a story, life as ceremony, and life as a tourist visit to earth. Fingarette goes on to discuss living a future without end and living a present without bounds. The author offers no facile consolation, but he identifies the true root of fear of death, and explains how the meaning of death can be reconceived.

"All of Herbert Fingarette's books are enormously personal voyages that explore with philosophical honesty real life dilemmas: self-deception, cultural alterity, the role of ritual, the achievement of personhood, justifications for alcoholism, and now death. One of Fingarette's most important career accomplishments." -- Roger T. Ames Philosophy East & West

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

"With a new chapter"
This new edition of Herbert Fingarette's classic study in philosophical psychology now includes a provocative recent essay on the topic by the author. A seminal work, the book has deeply influenced the fields of philosophy, ethics, psychology, and cognitive science, and it remains an important focal point for the large body of literature on self-deception that has appeared since its publication.
How can one deceive oneself if the very idea of deception implies that the deceiver knows the truth? The resolution of this paradox leads Fingarette to fundamental insights into the mind at work. He questions our basic ideas of self and the unconscious, personal responsibility and our ethical categories of guilt and innocence. Fingarette applies these ideas to the philosophies of Sartre and Kierkegaard, as well as to Freud's psychoanalytic theories and to contemporary research into neurosurgery. Included in this new edition, Fingarette's most recent essay, "Self-Deception Needs No Explaining (1998)," challenges the ideas in the extant literature.

"Heavy Drinking" informs the general public for the first time how recent research has discredited almost every widely held belief about alcoholism, including the very concept of alcoholism as a single disease with a unique cause. Herbert Fingarette presents constructive approaches to heavy drinking, including new methods of helping heavy drinkers and social policies for preventing heavy drinking and the harms associated with it.