Scholarly essays packed with closely reasoned arguments from the author and fellow academics, plus extensive historical...
Why do some people behave honorably and others badly? This has been a core question since the dawn of philosophy, and Ravven (Religious Studies/Hamilton Coll.; co-editor: Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, 2002) discusses the possibilities.
The popular answer, especially among nonphilosophers, is that we simply think matters over and behave. We have free will. Despite our upbringings, educations, hardships, group pressures and the limitations of our human brains, we choose our actions and must be held morally responsible for them. This turns out to be a remarkably parochial view that began with early Latin Christianity and quickly spread throughout the West but never caught on in other areas of the world, where fate, karma and other outside influences trump individual choice. No fan of free will, Ravven writes 10 densely argued but sometimes-accessible chapters that explore why humans act and how they justify themselves. It is often not a pretty picture. The mass shooting of Jews in Nazi-occupied Russia was carried out by ordinary German soldiers, not SS fanatics. All were told they could opt out with no penalties. A few did. Others could not stomach the killing and withdrew, but most carried on. They did not think, “what terrible things I am doing,” but rather, “this is a miserable job!” These men clearly chose their actions, but it’s a stretch to claim that they exercised free will.
Scholarly essays packed with closely reasoned arguments from the author and fellow academics, plus extensive historical analyses of thinkers from Aristotle to Spinoza to Malcolm Gladwell. Patient readers with a taste for philosophy will find that reading this book is a stimulating experience.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59558-537-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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