Virtue of Wit - by Clair Morrissey (Hardcover)

About the Book

Clair Morrissey defends a novel account of wit as the ability to artfully deploy playful ingenuity with words and behaviors that constitute our everyday shared social landscape.

Book Synopsis

Clair Morrissey defends a novel account of wit as the ability to artfully deploy playful ingenuity with words and behaviors that constitute our everyday shared social landscape. She argues that this aptitude for building human connection should be understood as a virtue, partially constitutive of living a good human life.

Review Quotes

ldquo;In this insightful analysis of the nature, role, and value of wit, Morrissey shows that wit isnrsquo;t just valuable because it is fun, but more significantly because of the ways in which being witty facilitates connection and community between people, therein creating and maintaining an ldquo;usrdquo;. Working from the perspective of non-ideal theory, and informed by feminist analyses of human agency, Morrissey makes a compelling case that developing wit is an essential part of how non-ideal agents can flourish, even and especially in contexts of oppression. This book makes an important contribution to the philosophical literature on humor and wit, as well as to non-ideal theory itself.rdquo;

ldquo;One of the many virtues of Clair Morrisseyrsquo;s The Virtue of Wit is that it exhibits the very aptitude it describes. Situating itself at the sometimes- precarious intersection of ethics and aesthetics, her investigation delves into matters ranging from the ways in which wit can foster human solidarity to the ways in which it embodies a facility for playing with language and ideas, from the moral weight it can bring to bear on situations to the ways it colors and enlivens our encounters with the world. That Morrisseyrsquo;s exploration is, in itself, playful and engaging offers a kind of bonus demonstration of the happy enchantment to which wit can conduce.rdquo;

About the Author

Clair Morrissey is professor of philosophy at Occidental College.