Ragged Clown

It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing…


Book Review – Philosophy by AC Grayling

November
2007

Still catching up on my book reviews here…

I have read a bunch of books about philosophers but I have never before read a book about philosophy. The trouble with reading about philosophers is that by that time you have slogged through 18 Greeks with similar sounding names they all blur into one and you can’t recall the difference between an atomist and an epicurean. It’s much easier to read about, say, ethics when it is all in one chapter.

Reading the book pretty much confirmed for me what Paul Graham said that the only thing 3000 years of philosophy has taught us is that there are limits to what we can know.

I am glad I read it but I won’t recommend it to anyone else.

The most disappointing thing was to read so many chapters about aesthetics, ethics, justice and morality and never once come across the word ‘evolution’. It seems a shocking oversight and I have written to Professor Grayling asking him to rectify that in a future edition.