Irene McMullin

Irene McMullin is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on Existentialism, Phenomenology, Ethics (especially virtue ethics and Kantian ethics), Moral Psychology, Social/Political Philosophy, and Aesthetics. She is primarily interested in questions of personhood and self-becoming - especially the role that other people play in those things. She draws inspiration from both Continental and Analytic approaches to Philosophy. She is the author of Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues (Cambridge UP, 2019) and Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations (Northwestern UP, 2013), as well as articles in academic journals on Husserl, Heidegger, Kant, Sartre, Arendt, and virtue ethics.

“Irene McMullin’s Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues is richly layered and deftly argued. The layers include detailed elucidation of practical rationality, references to previous debates in virtue ethics, and proposals plucked out of Levinas, Nietzsche, Kant, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger, and Husserl. Despite the heaviness of these many materials, McMullin writes with such dexterity as to encourage light and easy reflection right alongside her lapidary precision. Her style can also be warm and wry, as a line about “considering the moral reprobates that many of us count as friends” attests (143). In this book, questions like the following are not off-puttingly ponderous but, instead, a matter of what we think we are doing in our daily lives and interactions: What is it to live well? What type of effort must we put in? What, when it comes to becoming ourselves, are we working with? How do others factor in? What is the role of justice in all of this? When would we know that we are done? McMullin describes the book’s approach as “existentialist-phenomenological,” and the imagined reader is not, as you may have gathered, a committed existentialist or phenomenologist (7). The ideal reader is an ethicist who has considered eudaimonism a bit, with some reservations but a measure of sympathy. This reader has none of their time wasted.”

Professor Jennifer Baker

College of Charleston

Book Review published in the Journal ETHICS, July 2021