What is Philip Kitcher reading?

The current feature at Writers Read: Philip Kitcher, author of The Ethical Project.

His entry begins:

At present I’m reading three books (at different times of day). I tend to begin with the final volume of Thomas Mann’s diaries (Tagebücher). All ten volumes are a wonderful mixture of the mundane and the unusual. Mann tells us all sorts of details about his intake of coffee, his sleep troubles and his constipation, his visits to the barber and his daily walk. He also records his recurring struggles to write, the oppressive obligations imposed by all the letters he receives, his omnipresent sense that he is in decline and that life isn’t worth living, and – occasionally – the joy he feels at receiving an honor, or having a good conversation, or seeing a beautiful young man beside the seaside (or in a restaurant, or on the tennis court ...). The last volume is particularly poignant, because...[read on]

Among the early praise for The Ethical Project:

“Kitcher has created a wonderfully nuanced picture of how ethical standards arise and what they are like in small, stable communities. Taking the best of biology and philosophy, he points to the ways in which, even on a global scale, humans could generate explicit rules to regulate conduct. This is a brilliant and profoundly humane book.”
—Patrick Bateson, University of Cambridge

“This magnificent book promises to be a heavyweight contribution to the field of moral philosophy. Kitcher is one of the most elegant writers in the business; his thinking is subtle and profound.”
—Richard Joyce, Victoria University of Wellington

“Few philosophers bridge the natural sciences and moral philosophy as easily and elegantly as Kitcher, navigating around both the naturalistic fallacy and the "norm" of normative ethics. His account of how and why humans evolved into a moral species is both refreshing and respectful towards other approaches.”
—Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy and Our Inner Ape

Read more about The Ethical Project at the Harvard University Press website.

The Page 69 Test: Philip Kitcher's Living With Darwin.

Writers Read: Philip Kitcher.

--Marshal Zeringue