Changes

Way back when, when I started back on adult education having finished my university life (I know, it's hard to believe sometimes, but bear with me) I was asked if I was going to do a philosophy A-level. No, I said – there was no point in studying something nobody can agree about. The introduction to this book raises much the same point – the solution to philosophical questions and study is only ever going to be more questions. It says that Kant thought the study of thought, ''or, more precisely, how ideas are formed'' was the highest science, although that sounds like the psychology that I did indeed study. Still, study it many people do do – and probably a far greater number would wish to read around it and find out what it might be like to sound as if you have studied it – hence books like this.

It starts in a slightly off-putting manner, straight in with the metaphysics of nothingness. And we see another problem with philosophy – so much of it depends on someone's translation, here, that of Heidegger's German. We get a link from there to objectivity, but no – the next chapter is about morals – again digging a hole for itself with talk of meta-ethics, and linking on to matters of rightness and wrongness yet turning instead to the nature of free will and determinism. This scattershot approach did not serve me very well, but it certainly means the book is split up into tiny chapters – five or six pages at times, and concerns outright subjects and themes while never providing a potted history of philosophy (possibly a good thing when talking of the second -century writings of Plutarch in the light of evolution).

File next to [[The Complete Philosophy Files by Stephen Law]]. You might also appreciate [[Deep Thought: 42 Fantastic Quotes that Define Philosophy by Gary Cox]].