This collection of transcripts from a 50-year-old educational TV series has its creaky moments, but overall it is surprisingly fresh, containing much sound thinking on a variety of philosophical questions.
As if embarrassed to reveal the book's age, the publishers neglect to mention until the afterword that its contents were originally broadcast in 1953 – 54 as a series of 52 weekly half-hour TV shows. This material has been shaped into 52 chapters on the "Great Ideas": e.g., truth; knowledge and opinion; good and evil; beauty and art; law and government; philosophy; and God. Each idea is rationally investigated, on the assumption that clear thinking can yield some knowledge and sharpen some questions. As a window into television's early days, the book has curiosity value: viewers of the time evidently considered it good television to watch Adler (Art, the Arts, and the Great Ideas, 1994, etc.) discourse on philosophy with his sidekick Lloyd Luckman. Try selling that format to a network today! In some ways the show was forward-looking: viewers interacted with Adler, sending written queries that were answered the following week, like a slow-motion Internet forum. Other touches seem musty: references to President Eisenhower and the burning issue of "conformity versus dissent," and the absence of references to non-Western writings. Much of the content is familiar from Adler's other books, padded with the wordiness endemic to speech. Even so, the encyclopedic scope on issues of genuinely perennial interest is welcome, as is Adler's refreshingly non-postmodern optimism about the power of philosophy to discover truth.
Adler, who characterizes philosophy as "rational talk about the basic problems of mankind," is occasionally too talky, but for the most part delivers the rational discourse he promises.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8126-9412-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Open Court
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
Categories: PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
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BOOK REVIEW
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
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