Extract

The chief strength of the book is that the author is deeply familiar and engaged with the salient literature on luck, the analysis of knowledge, and moral responsibility. It does mean, though, that the result is very much inside baseball. If you aren't already in the thick of things, you probably won't be able to make head or tail of it. Reading this book is like humping a 50 lb backpack through tropical heat while the jungle gets denser, darker, and more impenetrable.

The book is very tortuously written, with cases, counterexamples, Named Principles, and thoroughly Chisholmed definitions coming fast and furious. The book is also chock-a-block with cosmic rays that alter doxastic structures, nefarious neurosurgeons that can install belief preventing devices, persons trapped in a box with Schrödinger's cat, drugs that degrade a person's ability to discern the cardinality of a collection without counting, and other intuition pumps that sometimes verge on parody. If that is your cup of tea, you will find many pots of it here.

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