An exemplary entry in the history of ideas.
Nadler (Philosophy/Univ. of Wisconsin; Rembrandt’s Jews, 2003, etc.) recounts a major episode in the history of early modern philosophy.
For centuries, philosophers have worried about the so-called problem of evil. Why did God create a world in which evil acts, the cause of so much suffering, are commonplace? If God is “constantly and intimately causally involved in the world,” as Nadler puts it, then why does he allow sin? Though such questions seldom exercise us moderns—who have come to the conclusion that “the world God created does not seem to be a very just place”—they were of signal concern to thinkers of past generations, particularly those of a theological bent. Enter Leipzig-born Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, polymath mathematician and philosopher, who, Nadler reveals, was also a secret agent working behind the scenes at the court of King Louis XIV on behalf of the city-state of Mainz, Germany, to settle an ever more tendentious rivalry between France and Holland. Leibniz acquitted himself well enough in that job, but he found himself more wrapped up in conversations with newfound friends Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche, who were absorbed in that timely problem of evil. The Lutheran but ecumenically minded Leibniz found lively interlocutors in the Catholic Malebranche and the Cartesian Arnauld, and they argued for years—all living to a very old age, perhaps kept going by the discussion. Nadler gives a lucid, graceful account of their back-and-forth, adding an elegant gloss of his own with unsettling touches, as when he observes, “Even God cannot bring it about that the world is governed by the most simple laws and that everyone is happy.”
An exemplary entry in the history of ideas.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-22998-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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