Since retiring in 2002 I have put in nearly two decades returning to philosophy, the intellectual passion of my youth. I left philosophy when I left the university and headed out into the world to make a life, start and raise a family and, ultimately, build a bit of a career. I never forgot my interest in things philosophical, of course, but I let them go as I put my energies into other things. Eventually I picked up another favored pastime of my youth when I wrote an historical novel in my later years on the job (during a hiatus when our upper management was in transition) and later published it myself (no luck finding representation or an interested publisher -- it was a Norse saga pastiche, written in an archaic voice, so I wasn't surprised). But after that book, and a couple of others, I kind of got bogged down. Why? I found my old interest in philosophy again and for a decade I lost myself in philosophical discussions and readings on the Internet (sometimes contentious -- philosopher wannabes can be pretty arrogant -- and always detailed and wide ranging) until I finally felt that I had something of my own to say. There followed two books. The first, Choice and Action, turned out to be a compilation of many essays expanded by me from my online jeremiads on those philosophy discussion groups, as well as some written especially for the new book.

Because the focus of those essays leaned toward ethics and meta-ethics and because, while back in college majoring in philosophy I had always thought that, if I wrote a book of philosophy, it would be focused on ethics and bear that name, that's the title I settled on. But Choice and Action was too disjointed a book and even while I believed the latter part of it made a cohesive case for the ethical answer I was trying to give, I came to think it had failed. And so I wrote another, one that I hoped would provide a more satisfactory answer to the questions I'd tried to deal with in the first. . .