The Public Intellectual

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 show more 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 view of old age differ from that of someone who thinks that lives and/or persons can be strongly discontinuous? What constitutes a fair distribution of social resources between young and old? And should recent developments in evolutionary theory have any impact on our answers to these questions? show less