I'm often quite gloomy about the prospects for the human future. But, although I have no competence to intervene directly in a political movement, I hope that what I write may, in combination with the suggestions of others, cause a shift in perspective that will inspire a world-wide movement to accept the only solution to climate change. And before it's too late.

In elaborating how "philosophy by showing" works, and in defending the idea that literature and music can contribute to philosophical "showing", I am also doing something more standardly philosophical. But I view most of the book as an interweaving of philosophy and literary criticism. If that entails a broadening of a standard idea of philosophy, it's a broadening I'd like to see happen.

I felt I should also contrast Visconti's treatment of the novella - usually damned by Mann fans (who typically respect Britten's more "faithful" adaptation). The Visconti film does many quite wonderful things, although there are good reasons for the condemnation.

One of the things I want to do in the book is to explore how philosophy can be done in literature. I start doing that in the first chapter, by introducing the idea of "philosophy by showing". What literature/philosophy shows is how to look at some important facets of life in a new way, thus changing the frame in which subsequent philosophical argument proceeds.

Critics who perceive the first level of Mann's irony recognize that the second voice is giving us reasons to be dubious about various aspects of Aschenbach's life and work. But many of them don't appreciate the second level of irony, the one exemplified in setting this narrative voice alongside the more sympathetic one, and inviting us to choose.

There are many critics whose work I greatly admire. Even though I diverge from T.J. Reed in several important ways, I've learned greatly from his writings on Mann.

Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.