The Morning Is Yours

A book for the person who has begun to ask the questions the surrounding culture has stopped asking out loud. There comes a moment, in nearly every human life, when an ordinary day pauses. You are walking home in the rain. You are sitting in a hospital corridor. You are standing in the kitchen at three in the morning. And without warning, a question arrives: Who am I, exactly? Why am I here? What, in the time I have, is this life for? The Morning Is Yours is a complete introduction to philosophy written for the reader who has been given information, technical training, and career pathways, but no sustained encounter with the long human conversation about how to live. Drawing on more than three decades of teaching, Moshe P. Weisblum, PhD, walks the reader slowly through the questions philosophy has asked since it began: what we can know, what we owe one another, what makes a life worth having lived. Across twelve chapters — on knowledge, consciousness, meaning, morality, time, truth, justice, freedom, and the good life — the book takes the reader seriously without condescending, flattering, or pretending the questions are easier than they are. Each chapter introduces the major thinkers in their own voices: Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Hobbes and Rousseau, Camus, Nietzsche, Berlin, Rawls. Each closes with notes and a guide to further reading, so the reader who wants to go deeper has somewhere to go. This is not a textbook, and it is not a self-help book. It is a teacher's book, in the oldest sense — written for one person at a time, in the conviction that the questions that woke you in the middle of the night are not eccentric, are not new, and are not yours alone. Human beings have been asking them as long as there have been human beings, and a great deal has been worked out that you were never told. "The morning is already beginning. It has been waiting for you longer than you know." For readers of Pierre Hadot, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, and anyone who has ever stood at the kitchen window before dawn and wondered what their life is for. Read more