J.D. Velleman, On Being Me: A Personal Invitation to Philosophy (with illustrations by Emily C. Bernstein). Princeton an
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J.D. Velleman, On Being Me: A Personal Invitation to Philosophy (with illustrations by Emily C. Bernstein). Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020. ISBN 978‑0‑691‑20095‑8, $12.95, Hbk Daniel Peixoto Murata1 Accepted: 10 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
1 Introduction J. David Velleman is an accomplished philosopher. He published widely in moral philosophy, philosophy of action, emotions, and more. As one of his final publications before retirement, Velleman gave us On Being Me – a personal invitation to philosophy, featuring illustrations from the New Yorker illustrator Emily C. Bernstein and published by the Princeton University Press (all numbers in parentheses in this essay refer to pages on this book, unless otherwise specified). The title of the book speaks volumes. It is an investigation on what it means to be who we are, in the first personal sense of the expression, that is, what it means for me to be me. It is also a deeply personal book. Velleman brings to the text many of his personal experiences, from the desire to eat a bowl of chilli for lunch to his memories about his grandfather, and the personal aspect of the book is enhanced by Bernstein’s simple yet effective illustrations. This is no philosophizing at the pub, however. Velleman is the real deal, and this book, albeit (and rightly) devoid of technical jargon, is dense, very dense. You do not need to be a professional philosopher to read it, for sure, but its less than hundred pages will be quite a challenge for the uninitiated. Right at the preface of the book Velleman warns us that in it “there are no arguments. There are only observations of what being a person is like for me and speculations as to why it might be like that” (p. xii). With this warning, he is doing two things. Firstly, he is guarding himself against professional philosophers that might try to press formal, academic, argument against the book. Professional philosophers have a rather unpleasant habit of making a meal of their own colleagues every time they try to do something outside the liturgy of professional philosophy. Indeed, one review at Amazon.uk (where I have bought my copy of the book) gave it just one star out of five, precisely because the reviewer saw no arguments in it. * Daniel Peixoto Murata [email protected] 1
School of Law, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
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Book Review
I have no way to know if that reviewer was a professional philosopher or not, but anyway the commentary illustrates another common vice: sometimes professional philosophers read things looking for the weak spots, and they forget to look for bits of the text that were there precisely to avoid that criticism. Secondly, Velleman’s disclaimer also releases him from the need to present a philosophical system, an all-worked-out model for what it means to be me. The main style of the book is experimental. He pursues his thoughts and tries to work them out, and when he hits unpleasant or paradoxical conclusions, like in his disc
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