We all use counterfactuals whether we are aware of it or not. But what are they? Counterfactuals introduces and explores both the history of the idea and contemporary use of counterfactuals in our everyday lives.

What are counterfactuals and what is their point? In many cases, none at all. It may be true that if kangaroos didn’t have tails, they would fall over, but they do have tails and if they didn’t they wouldn’t be kangaroos (or would they?). This is the sort of thing that can give counterfactuals a bad name, as inhabitants of a La La Land of the mind. On the other hand, counterfactuals do useful service across a broad range of disciplines in both the sciences and the humanities, including philosophy, history, cosmology, biology, cognitive psychology, jurisprudence, economics, art history, literary theory. They are also richly, albeit sometimes treacherously, present in the everyday human realm of how our lives are both imagined and lived: in the ‘crossroads’ scenario of decision-making, the place of regret in retrospective assessments of paths taken and not taken, and, at the outer limit, as the wish not to have been born. Christopher Prendergast take us on a dizzying exploratory journey through some of these intellectual and human landscapes, mobilizing a wide range of reference from antiquity to the present, and sustained by the belief that, whether as help or hindrance, and with many variations across cultures, counterfactual thinking and imagining are fundamental to what it is to be human.

"Here’s a counterfactual: if this book were less good, it would be easier to review. It’s quite rare to come across a book like this which is, quite simply, for the humanities. If we imagine a world where this book had no audience, where, say, the meanings of Petrarch’s climb and Ignatius’ indecision were forgotten, it would be a much colder and less wise one." - Times Higher Education

"[These] books are sophisticated straws in a rising wind." - Times Literary Supplement (joint-reviewed with Things That Didin't Happen)

"[These books] add up to more than the sum of two deeply meditated, extensively researched projects ... [They] invite more interesting questions than I can count." - London Review of Books (joint-reviewed with Telling It Like It Wasn't)