Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life

A leading philosopher explains how risk-taking can help us live authentic and flourishing livesWe take risks every day-perhaps not the extreme, dangling-off-the-side-of-a-mountain kind of risks, but risks nonetheless, in decisions about careers, marriage, children, moving house, and other matters.Tempting fate is simply what we have to do from time to time in life.But how we should go about tempting fate in a reasonable way?In this illuminating book, philosopher Duncan Pritchard explains why risk-taking, even extreme risk-taking, can sometimes be both reasonable and admirable, and how it can play a crucial role in living an authentic life. Using Alex Honnold’s famous free solo climb of El Capitan as a paradigm example of admirable risk-taking, Pritchard offers a completely new theory of risk, one that explains it in terms of fragility rather than probability.He shows how fragility can explain why skill and preparation are crucial to sensible risk-taking, even when the activity is unavo