I read this book on basis of positive book reviews and I can only agree with those recommendations. Prof. Gaita as a professional philosopher deals with profound yet everyday occurrences and issues of human life, as the title also suggests: 'thinking about love and truth and justice'. This book deals with morality, concepts of good and evil and what occurs in human lives with intelligence, subtlety and compassion. He discusses, inter alia, the Holocaust, racism, and Australian Aboriginals. He points out that other people are treated as sub-humans only when there is a denial of the common humanity with the other. And these are issues on what occurs in human lives that every generation has to face and think about anew. I particularly liked his explanation of our relation to other, the notion that our sense of reality of others is partly conditioned by our vulnerability to them, the realisation of what it means to wrong them. Remorse is that realisation, and it is interdependent with a definite (and innate?) concept of evil. Grief, when it is not self-indulgent, is a heightened form of the awareness of another, a pained realisation of the independent reality of those we have lost. According to Gaita, it is astonishing that there could be such a state as guilt and suffering as remorse, with as a counterpart the wonder that other human beings could matter so much to us.

It is challenging, moving, and certainly not an easy book to read, and i do not pretend I always fully could follow the reasoning. But then, i did not expect it to be easy. In fact, I would have been suspicious if that would have been the case. The approach is different from e.g. the American philosopher R. Rorty and i found it as enlightening. Recommended!

Who cares about this totally undistinguished and uniteresting life. Not me. Waste of money.