Book Review: Introducing Philosophy
Trip Start
Jul 19, 2008
1
11
15
Trip End
Aug 31, 2009
Shanghai,
Shanghai,
China
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
I have never studied philosophy and I thought that an introduction might be useful, especially if I am to spend a year finding either myself, or the meaning of life.
This book is fairly basic. It spends a page or two on significant philosophers or philosophies through time, and it is also illustrated which pads it out to 169 pages. I took me about 3 hours to get through, including a few re-read mind-bending sections.
As a basic introduction I think it does what it sets out to for three quarters of the book. The historic figures such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are covered chronologically and the lines from one to the other are drawn pretty clearly
Book reviewed
.Where the book became very confusing is towards the end. Like many sciences, as time has passed there have been ever more specialisms and branches. I read somewhere that 250 years ago it was possible for one person to know everything that was known by all humans. This is clearly not the case today as the body of all knowledge has grown, and it is unlikely that someone that specializes in dentistry, to pick an example at random, also knows all there is to know about jet propulsion and breeding pedigree dogs.
But I digress; philosophy has clearly expanded and branched out like everything else, but I found that the book does not distinguish between what are the main, commonly agreed upon, current issues and what are minor offshoots of the bigger subject. Therefore I cannot readily summarise where philosophy has got to today and what are its greatest challenges.
The biggest issue I had though was wrapping my head around some of the later concepts introduced. I need to re-read, or do further reading about some of these if I am to understand them more clearly. Specifically there is debate about the relationship between language and reality, where some modern philosophers believe we can never separate language and reality as our thoughts are based in language and so our reality is limited to what can be described in that language (Andy takes a deep breath). Now I have never remotely considered this concept, and I get their logic at a basic level, but I am not sure that I agree with it at all. Perhaps that is the point of philosophy and in the end the book has done its job.
4 out of 5
