An expansive alternative for those who have struggled with the "higher power" of AA's 12-step program, Higher and Friendly Powers offers a sense of human decency, moral ideals, and even a better version of oneself. In Higher and Friendly Powers, Peg O'Connor addresses an audience much like herself: those in recovery who have struggled with the Christian-centric God at the heart of Alcoholics Anonymous. She brings our attention to a little-known fact: the term "higher powe...

Moral philosophy, like much of philosophy generally, has been bedeviled by an obsession with seeking secure epistemological foundations and with dichotomies between mind and body, fact and value, subjectivity and objectivity, nature and normativity. These are still alive today in the realism-versus-antirealism debates in ethics. Peg O'Connor draws inspiration from the later Wittgenstein's philosophy to sidestep these pitfalls and develop a new approach to the grounding of ethics (i.e., met...

An indispensable guide to the deeply philosophical concerns at the heart of every addict's struggle.Addiction and recovery are, at their core, about the meaning of life. Life on the Rocks is the first book to address addiction and recovery from a Western philosophical perspective, offering a powerful set of tools sharpened over millennia. It introduces some of the core concepts and vexing questions of philosophy to help addicts and those affected by their ...

Combating homophobia, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and violence in our society requires more than just focusing on the overt acts of prejudiced and abusive individuals. The very intelligibility of such acts, in fact, depends upon a background of shared beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that together form the context of social practices in which these acts come to have the meaning they do. This book, inspired by Wittgenstein as well as feminist and critical race theory,...

A fresh look at the legacy of Sandra Day O'Connor from hardscrabble childhood in the Arizona desert, to facing adversity as a female in politics, to her work as the first woman Justice on the US Supreme Court.By being the first woman on the Supreme Court, O'Connor set the stage for future gender equity in America's legal system, becoming one of the most significant people in US history. This accessible analysis of O'Connor's life, examines how her early beginnings ...