The Philosophy of Ted Chiang

by David Friedell (Editor)

Overview

Ted Chiang is one of the most insightful science fiction writers of our time. His writing has garnered high praise, including four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His short story, “Story of Your Life,” was the basis of the 2016 film Arrival. This volume, which includes a foreword by Chiang and twenty-one short essays by philosophers, analyzes the philosophical significance of Chiang’s popular science fiction. These essays discuss how Chiang’s stories engage with age-old and contemporary philosophical questions pertaining to free will, God, technology, existentialism, beauty, procreation, contradictions, time, human intelligence, alien intelligence, and artificial intelligence. This volume probes terrain that should be of interest to experts in philosophy, while still being accessible to a general audience interested in science fiction. These essays, like Ted Chiang’s writing, demonstrate how excellent science fiction can help us to think about the world and our place in it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031816628
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	05/24/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	935 KB

About the Author

David Friedell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Union College (Schenectady, NY). His work has appeared in journals including Philosophical Studies, Analysis, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

Table of Contents

Part I. Free Will.- 1. Why the Market Value of Free Will is $99.99.- 2. Many-worlds and Free Will.- Part II. God.- 3. Death, God, and Meaning in Ted Chiang’s Stories.- 4. The Presence of Evil and the Absence of God.- 5. Gabe Rabin, Mysterious Ways: Making Sense of God’s Actions in Hell Is the Absence of God. Part III. Technology.- 6. The Value of Fact and Feeling.- 7. We Can Remember It for You Better: Ted Chiang on Technology and Human Knowledge.- Part IV. Existentialism.- 8. How to Live With Freedom.- 9. Existential Responsibility in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Chiang.- Part V. Beauty.- 10. Just Looking: Check Out the Computational Topography on Her!.- 11. Should You Like What You See? Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Appreciation of Human Beauty.- Part VI. Procreation Ethics.- 12. The Ethics of Making a Short Life.- Part VII. Contradictions.- 13. Knowledge, Symbols, and Understanding.- 14. Choosing What’s Fictionally True.- Part VIII. Time.- 15. Time Machines and Predictors are Possible but Unlikely.- 16. The Temporality of Our Emotions and Time in Ted Chiang’s Stories.- Part IX. Human and Alien Intelligence.- 17. Language, Thought, Experience, and Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”.- 18. Jeopardy! and the Stories of Our Lives.- 19. What Is It to Understand Enlightenment?.- Part X. Artificial Intelligence.- 20. Raising an AI Teenager.- 21. Save the Digients! On the Moral Status of AI.

Editorial Reviews

A worthwhile volume for devoted fans of Chiang’s work as well as academic philosophers and laypersons in love with deep questions, and a notable exception to the publishing trend of over-philosophizing the non-philosophical, The Philosophy of Ted Chiang does some justice to the wonderful stories of one of our greatest living explorers of the human condition.” (Anthony Eagan, Santa Fe Institute, santafe.edu, June 23, 2025)

From the Publisher