Innis, Robert E. (UMass Lowell)

Locating One's Life: Forms of Existential Placement - SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought Innis, Robert E. (UMass Lowell)

A multifaceted and novel examination of core problematic contexts and pathways of life and how we locate and orient ourselves in them. What does it mean to actively or reflectively locate oneself in the life contexts in which one finds oneself? Locating One's Life explores from various angles striking exemplifications of how locating one’s life can be understood as a form of reflection and as a concrete action of existential placement. It is something we do by our actions and decisions as well as by our recognition or understanding of the multiple problematic situations and their consequences that we find ourselves faced with or suffering from in our lives.

These situations range from deathbed or late-life recollections of one’s life course to finding ways to situate oneself in the mysterious totality of the clashing cosmic powers and overwhelming beauty of the universe into which we ultimately disappear. Such themes are linked in a sequence of accessible chapters that challenge and enable each of us to locate our own lives in light of the existential lessons they take up: accepting approaching death or old age by bringing one’s life to mind in memory, practicing, Stoic fashion, how to face the present with its unavoidable or even fatal demands, the enriching dislocating nature of travel, being or staying healthy as a soulful form of existential balance, the distinctively human forms of hunger and eating, and other contexts of life, including our religious practices of self-placement in the universe as the ultimate context of all contexts.