AIRED: April 11, 2016– 11 am PST
TITLE: “Life on the Rocks: Finding Meaning in Addiction and Recovery”
An indispensable guide to the deeply philosophical concerns at the heart of every addict’s struggle. Life on the Rocks: Finding Meaning in Addiction and Recovery is the first book to address addiction and recovery from a Western philosophical perspective, offering a powerful set of tools sharpened over millennia.
“As a gifted writer, O’Connor has written a most unique take on addiction and recovery through the words and views of philosophers and her own experiences. Most importantly, she makes it all accessible and fascinating—with practical insights that put a new spin on some old clichés about what it takes to live a rich, meaningful, and joyful life beyond addiction.” — Anne M. Fletcher, Author of Inside Rehab and Sober for Good
Assuming no prior familiarity with the subject, O’Connor draws upon the wisdom of the whole philosophical tradition from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, illuminating issues all addicts and their loved ones face: self-identity, moral responsibility, self-knowledge and self-deception, free will and determinism, fatalism, the nature of God, and their relations to others.
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ABOUT PEG O’CONNOR, PHd
Peg O’Connor is Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota. She writes the popular Psychology Today blog “Philosophy Stirred, Not Shaken” (with over 375,00 unique hits to her thirty-four posts to date), and is a featured columnist for for ProTalks, part of the Rehab.com online community of addiction treatment specialists.
In her writing, which has appeared in the New York Times and the Huffington Post, she uses philosophy to illuminate the complexities of addiction as a lived experience. Her previous books include Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life (2008) and Oppression and Responsibility (2002).
