Finding Our Sea-Legs

For millennia, philosophers have spun tales about goodness and badness, yet in matters of ethics, agreement is curiously hard to find. Finding Our Sea-Legs takes a new approach to these old debates.

This book casts the reader adrift on a sea of stories where multiple traditions converge: from ancient India to the fishmarkets of New York, and from East Indonesia to the philosophical traditions of China. Attentive to the changes in the winds and the tides, it draws on the resources of both philosophy and storytelling to explore our complex experiences of time, of others, and of storytelling itself.

In doing so, Finding Our Sea-Legs throws new light on the traditions of philosophy—from Aristotle to Emmanuel Levinas—and explores ethics not as a means of finding our way back to safe harbour, but instead as a way of acclimatising ourselves to life on the seas of uncertainty.

1. In the Marketplace in Darjeeling, Early One Morning

2. All at Sea: A Philosophical Parable

3. Casting Off

4. Storytelling and Experience

5. A Naïve Phenomenology of Ethics

6. Stories About Stories

7. Stories about Time

8. Stories about Others

9. Conclusion: Beyond Dreams of Dry Land

Afterword to the Revised Edition
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Will Buckingham