Coping: A Philosophical Guide

Coping is a collection of philosophical essays on how we deal with life’s challenges. We hope for better times, but what is hope, and is it a good thing to hope? How do we look back and make sense of our lives in the face of death? What is the nature of love, and how do we deal with its hardships? What makes for a genuine apology, and is there too much or too little apologizing in this world? Can we bring about changes in ourselves to adapt to our circumstances? How can we make sense of all the good advice—such as, count your blessings, don’t cry over spilled milk—that people have on offer?

Coping is a perfect companion text for a moral psychology course, a resilience course, or part of an ethics course. The material is written for readers who are new to philosophy and progresses in short self-contained sections. It draws on literature, music, podcasts, and news items. Each chapter has questions for discussion or essay writing and suggestions for material to explore the topic further.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Author and Illustrator Biographies

Why This Book? Download
Luc Bovens

1. Hope Download
Luc Bovens

2. Death Download
Luc Bovens

3. Love Download
Luc Bovens

4. Reconciliation Download
Luc Bovens

5. Self-Management Download
Luc Bovens

6. Counsel Download
Luc Bovens

Final Words Download
Luc Bovens

Additional Teaching Materials Download
Luc Bovens

Discussion Questions Download
Luc Bovens

Links Download
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Index

Luc Bovens is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he teaches in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program. He is a joint author with Stephan Hartmann of Bayesian Epistemology (OUP 2003) and has collaborated with Fiorella Lavado on the TESS (Teaching Ethics with Short Stories) website (2018). His interests are in moral psychology and philosophy & public policy. He has held previous appointments in the University of Colorado at Boulder (1990-2003) and in the London School of Economics and Political Science (2004-2017).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes, providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that he endorses you or your use of the work).