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Reading as a Philosophical Practice asks why reading—everyday reading for pleasure—matters so profoundly to so many people. Its answer is that reading is an implicitly philosophical activity. To passionate readers, it is a way of working through, and taking a stand on, certain fundamental questions about who and what we are, how we should live, and how we relate to other things. The book examines the lessons that the activity of reading seems to teach about selfhood, morality and ontology, and it tries to clarify the sometimes paradoxical claims that serious readers have made about it. To do so, it proposes an original theoretical framework based on Virginia Woolf’s notion of the common reader and Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of practice. It also asks whether reading can continue to play this role as paper is replaced by electronic screens.
“Robert Piercey has written an important, engaging, and accessible book about books – specifically, about why we should all read more books. He argues that reading is a philosophical practice as conceived by Alasdair MacIntyre and that we should think about the benefits of the practice in terms of this conception rather than in the narrower frames of reference currently employed by the disciplines of literary aesthetics and literary criticism. Piercey has the enviable ability to both make an original contribution to academic scholarship across several disciplines and provide an intelligent and lively read for those that care about books outside the academy. To use his own term, this is a book for everyone who has a reading life, whether or not they are aware of it.” — Rafe McGregor, Senior Lecturer, Edge Hill University, UK
Acknowledgements; 1. Philosophizing about Reading: The Very Idea; 2. The Reading Self; 3. The Reading Life; 4. Ethics from Reading?; 5. Ethics of Reading?; 6. Reading Things; 7. The Future of the Common Reader; Notes; Bibliography; Index.