About

Although it was his attraction to fiction that drew him back to writing, after a thirty year hiatus, his latest is in another genre entirely: contemporary moral philosophy. Value and Representation follows his earlier foray into the realm of moral philosophy, Choice and Action, which addressed classic concerns in the realm of ethics and its modern variant, metaethics, in light of the implications of Hume’s moral skepticism. The new book aims to flesh out and complete his earlier account of ethics in action by developing a pragmatic epistemological approach that situates our moral claims in the context of our human capacity to know and operate in a world that extends beyond the immediate place and time within which we stand.

Mirsky, who studied philosophy before traveling to parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, spent his career in the halls of local government before writing his first book, The King of Vinland’s Saga, an historical novel about Vikings and Indians in eleventh century North America (published in late 1998) followed, in 2006, by A Raft on the River, a novelized account of events surrounding a fifteen year old girl’s efforts to survive the Nazis in war torn eastern Poland during World War II.

A regular contributor to the Wittgensteinian oriented philosophy blog, Serious Philosophy (http://ludwig.squarespace.com/volume-15/), Mirsky has also written for several newspapers and other periodicals. In 2005 he edited and prepared the Holocaust memoir Bitter Freedom by Jafa Wallach for publication.