Synopsis
A modern philosopher and author of Modern Philosophy presents a useful, refreshing guide for "doing" rather than "studying" philosophy, making the subject accessible and real to the layperson. 10,000 first printing.
Reviews
Scruton, a don at London University and a British TV personality, sets out to do philosophy rather than talk about it. He succeeds to a large extent in making the subject accessible, engaging the reader in philosophic thinking. Scruton inquires into truth, time, God, freedom, morality and even sex, carefully explaining who he believes is right and who is wrong in their opinions on the subjects. For instance, he warns against Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, and champions everyone who believes in persons with souls and free intentions, and who believes in the sacred and enchantment in the world. In addition to such authoritarian judgments, Scruton sometimes gets caught up in fighting internecine battles, especially against the view that genuine knowledge can only be scientific; then the clarity of his writing suffers. For example, "since the origin of both self and not-self is the act of self-positing, nothing on either side of the barrier is anything, in the last analysis, but self." When he philosophizes more freely, he puts the reader in a better mood: "This idea has recurred so often as to suggest that there is truth in it or a permanent need to believe so." In the final analysis, Scruton accomplishes his aim of using philosophy as therapy for our modern confusions, although mental health for him lies in more conservative thinking.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Scruton, an academic philosopher who enjoys addressing popular audiences (Modern Philosophy, not reviewed), answers some of philosophy's perennial questions with the self-assurance and intolerance of ambiguity that characterize much of the British analytic tradition. In a time of heartless scientism and postmodern despair, Scruton wishes to recover for philosophy its theoretical and practical relevance to ordinary human life. Under concisely formulated chapter headings--Truth, God, Freedom, etc.--he discusses an array of topics, from time and history to music and sex. He opens with a curious deduction: that to interest others in philosophy, he must write on what interests himself. The concealed assumption--that only out of self-regard can we behave with regard for others--is itself a philosophical position that not all readers will accept. For one who celebrates the interrogatory mood of philosophy, Scruton is overly declarative. Questionable presuppositions go unquestioned. For example, Scruton's argument against the self-consciousness of animals-- that their behavior can be explained on simpler grounds-- presupposes the philosophical principle of economy, better known as Occam's Razor, which he neither credits nor defends. On the other hand, Kant receives much credit for persuasively restating one of philosophy's more enduring puzzles: How can human beings simultaneously be both subjects (of free, moral acts) and objects (of scientific study)? Scruton's suggested solution, that we look for an answer beyond words, in music--which superimposes over ordinary time a different but simultaneous esthetic time--has a history in German idealist and romantic esthetics that he might have more openly acknowledged. Though by his ultimate Wittgensteinian demand that philosophical language either speak with pellucid clarity or else fall silent, Scruton presumes to banish all uncertainty from his words, the uncertainties remain, hidden beneath the surface. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"The ever-growing archive of the great unread" expresses Scruton's opinion of most philosophy books. To make his readable, Scruton eschews jargon and underlines the subject's relevancy to a person's self-awareness. Most people wonder about our differences from animals, the origins of ethics, the bases of virtue and vice, the existence of God, all of which Scruton examines. But he worries that postmodern philosophy has been overrun by Nietzsche and Foucault and has become "scientized," whether one contemplates sex or consciousness. This essay is really a brilliant, pithy rebellion against that and an encouragement to the disenchanted to explore with Scruton the morals of the person. The history of philosophy is not his concern, rather the concerns of philosophy are: What is truth, causality, time, free will? Scruton marks out plain English arguments for these concerns and disputes such corrosive assertions that truth is relative, freedom an illusion, and God dead--or counters that they lie in the realm of the unaskable questions that Witt-genstein described. A readable tract that should gather no dust. Gilbert Taylor
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