Luck permeates our lives, and this raises a number of pressing questions: What is luck? When we attribute luck to people, circumstances, or events, what are we attributing? Do we have any obligations to mitigate the harms done to people who are less fortunate? And to what extent is deserving praise or blame affected by good or bad luck? Although acquiring a true belief by an uneducated guess involves a kind of luck that precludes knowledge, does all luck undermine knowledge? The academic literature has seen growing, interdisciplinary interest in luck, and this volume brings together and explains the most important areas of this research. It consists of 39 newly commissioned chapters, written by an internationally acclaimed team of philosophers and psychologists, for a readership of students and researchers. Its coverage is divided into six sections:

I: The History of Luck

II: The Nature of Luck

III: Moral Luck

IV: Epistemic Luck

V: The Psychology of Luck

VI: Future Research.

The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from the problem of moral luck, to anti-luck epistemology, to the relationship between luck attributions and cognitive biases, to meta-questions regarding the nature of luck itself, to a range of other theoretical and empirical questions. By bringing this research together, the Handbook serves as both a touchstone for understanding the relevant issues and a first port of call for future research on luck.

About the Author

Ian M. Church is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hillsdale College. He is the co-author (with Peter Samuelson) of Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy & Science (2017).

Robert J. Hartman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Lund-Gothenburg Responsibility Project at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is the author of In Defense of Moral Luck: Why Luck Often Affects Praiseworthiness and Blameworthiness (2017).

Reviews

"This is an essential guidebook for anyone whose work engages conceptual or empirical questions about luck and related phenomena. It will be of great interest and use to anyone working in epistemology, philosophy of action, ethics, social and political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. This comprehensive volume boasts a long list of first-class contributors - Church and Hartman deserve hearty thanks and congratulations."

--E.J. Coffman, The University of Tennessee

"Debates about luck are central to a range of philosophical debates, from epistemology to free will. This impressive volume presents the state of art across this range, and extends it into new areas. It will be a central reference point for years to come."

--Neil Levy, Macquarie University

Book Information
ISBN 9780367731663
Author Ian M. Church
Format Paperback
Page Count 486
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g