Serious pieces that serve as counterweights to the frothy blogosphere.
Philosophy made relevant by writers grappling with thorny issues.
For this eclectic, lively gathering of essays, New York Times online opinion editor Catapano and philosophy professor Critchley (New School for Social Research; Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, 2012, etc.) have selected 133 pieces from about 350 published in the Times’ online series The Stone. Launched in 2010, the series invites contributions “on issues both timely and timeless” from writers who may or may not identify themselves as philosophers. Any thinker will do, including journalists moved by the urgency of current events. The series’ name comes from the “legendarily transformative” philosopher’s stone, a magical, mystical material with the power of changing base metals to gold. That etymology suggests a grander project than these editors have in mind. Their goal is to publish thoughtful, provocative, accessible pieces that may persuade readers that philosophy—defined broadly—matters. Critchley is a major contributor, with eight essays on topics such as love, faith, and the desire for revenge incited by 9/11. University of Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting also appears repeatedly, with essays on mind (depression, consciousness), existentialism, and the controversy over gun control. Readers will find some familiar names among contributors—biologist E.O. Wilson, activist Peter Singer, cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker—but many are academic philosophers able to make Hegel, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Simone Weil relevant for general readers. The editors provide a preface for each of four sections: on the discipline of philosophy; the contribution of science to “the riddle of the human species”; vexing questions about religion, morality, and God; and society, which includes reflections on economics, politics, family, race (including the killing of Trayvon Martin), violence (including the Sandy Hook school shootings), and America’s fierce attachment to what Firmin DeBrabander calls “robust individualism and self-determination.”
Serious pieces that serve as counterweights to the frothy blogosphere.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63149-071-2
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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