John T. Lysaker

NEVER A MOMENT’S TRUCE: PERFECTIONISM, VIRTUE, & THE EXAMINED LIFE defends and elaborates moral perfectionism as an evolving tradition with multiple, conflicting roots. In addition to comparing, contrasting, and critiquing paradigmatic perfectionist theories such as Cavell’s and Murdoch’s, the book articulates a set of excellences or virtues that are essential for perfectionist projects, such as attention, honesty, and integrity. As with Hope, Trust, & Forgiveness: Essays in Finitude, this book argues that perfectionism is capable of first-order, normative theorizing, even as it accounts for and informs how theorizing can deepen ethical life. Finally, it proposes that perfectionism is best understood as a moment of moral maturity born of the realization that ethical life is no less a creature of finitude than any other human endeavor.

A FERMENT OF EXISTENCE: FRIENDSHIP & THE BETTER LIFE is an extended meditation on the nature of friendship and its import for ethical life. Through short essays, aphorisms, and scholarly contestations, I argue that friendship provides vital goods including {1} companionship, concrete, believable recognition, support in the form of reassurance, material care, and exhortation, and provocation. I further argue that friendship exposes dynamics essential to ethical life and provides a mature model of a goodwill that eludes Nietzsche’s critique of morality and is preferable to models of morality derived from the rule of law.