Lee is working on two new books:

MAKING PHILOSOPHY MATTER: How Philosophy Can Help Us To Change The World And Ourselves For The Better

People are looking for answers in their lives, but they are not getting them from philosophy. Why is the world sometimes such an awful place? Why are we so unhappy in our work? How can we live more meaningful lives? These are the sort of "big questions" that one might imagine philosophers to be concerned with.

Instead, professional philosophers have spent the last hundred years or so largely engaged with puzzles of language and logic that have little to do with the pressing concerns of day-to-day life. If the popular conception of the philosopher is of the bearded sage who ponders the meaning of human existence, the concrete reality is of a hard-headed specialist in logic or the philosophy of language, who is literally more concerned with the meaning of words than the meaning of life.

But does philosophy have to be this way? Has it always been? The answer to both of these questions is no, for we see in the history of philosophy that what started out 2400 years ago as a search for truth that was intimately connected with the practical concern of living a good life, has now devolved into a profession that cares little about making any connection with the sort of questions that frame the quest to live a meaningful life or improve the human condition.

In Making Philosophy Matter, I seek to redeem the reputation of philosophy, both for the individual and for the role that philosophy might play in the public arena, by showing how philosophy can give us the tools to live a better life. But first philosophy must be rescued from the professional academic. This book is a defense of philosophy, but it is also a critique of how philosophy has been practiced by current day academics—of the process by which philosophers are made in graduate school, of how we treat young professors seeking tenure, and of how the discipline has treated the legions of philosophers who have "failed" to make it as professional academics. In this book I explore several arguments that answer the question of how philosophy can help us to do three things: live a better life, find more meaning in our work, and make the world a better place. Along the way, I tell my own story, which I believe is in many ways emblematic of some of the virtues, as well as the failures, of philosophy as a discipline. My goal in doing so is to provide two different ways to address the central question framed in this book: is there a way to make philosophy matter more than it has in the recent past? I maintain that we can accomplish this goal, and that the seeds of this transformation already exist within the discipline of philosophy. But, in order to realize this, there must be a sea change in the rites of socialization within the profession—and in the attitude toward what philosophy can accomplish—such that we fully embrace the idea that philosophy can and should have a larger role than what has been carved out for it by academic philosophers.

In short, Making Philosophy Matter is an exploration and defense of something that was lost in philosophy over a hundred years ago, which is a conviction that philosophy should not only be about theory, but should also seek to make a practical difference to our everyday lives.

THE ART OF GOOD AND EVIL (a novel)

What is the greatest good? What would you do if you learned that the greatest moral action that you could perform required you to break the law and become an outcast to society?

When philosophy professor Jonathan Poe suffers a personal tragedy that robs him of everything that has given his life meaning, he is forced to consider anew what his life is about....and whether it's worth living at all. When he accidentally discovers that his life's new moral purpose inevitably leads to a conflict with the law, he embarks on a course of ruthless action that not only threatens his own life and freedom, but also the underpinnings of the legal system as we know it.

In this "ethical thriller," I consider the gut-wrenching question of what might happen if we followed the dictates of morality to their logical conclusion and the shattering aftermath of the law of unintended consequences.

Read Lee's article "The Dark Ages of Social Science" in The Humanist

Dark Ages is now widely available in paperback

Dark Ages has won the Silver Award for Philosophy in the 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards