Long Live invites you to a wide range of Plato's writings, up to the modern philosophical work of Derek Parfitt, Bernard Williams, and others, and of King Lear Shakespeare through the works of Thomas Mann, Balzac, Dickens, Beckett, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, , Philip Roth, and JM Coetzee. "If we want to understand aging, we have to think more fundamentally about what it means to be a human being, to have a life, to live (or lead) a good life, to be part of a just society," says Helen.

What did Plato mean when he suggested that aging was the best place to practice philosophy - or Thomas Mann when he knew aging as the best time to be a writer - were they right? If we believe, as Aristotle did, that good life requires the active pursuit of virtue, how will our view of later life be affected? If we think that spirits and people are united, as stories are said to be united, how does our thinking about aging differ from that of a person who believes that life and / or people can be very fragmented? In a just society, what constitutes the equitable distribution of limited resources between young and old? How, however, should recent developments in evolutionary evolutionary theory change our thinking about what it means to grow up? This is a pioneering book, deep and wide, and is likely to change the way we speak about one of the major social concerns of our time - the increasing numbers of those living in age, and the growing proportion of age to young people.

I want that book.