Readers seeking a more humane, more direct orientation would do well to dust off Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1974),...
What is science? In this sporadically interesting primer, Lewens (Philosophy of Science/Cambridge Univ.; Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges, 2015, etc.) mostly answers by saying what science isn’t.
“What is the meaning of science? This is not a question that science will answer on its own.” Look closely at the formulation as Wittgenstein might, and you have a justification for why philosophers of science should draw a paycheck—after all, the scientists can’t tell you what it all means, and someone has to. That’s all to the good, but some of what Lewens explores isn’t really the province of science. The ancient question of whether humans possess free will is not one that science as such bothers with, though it has some bearing on cognitive research. The author’s answer is characteristically hedged. “Neuroscience,” he writes, “has not yet shown freedom to be an illusion.” Not yet, but come the singularity, watch out. The issue of what constitutes an appropriate problem for science is material, for, as Lewens notes toward the end of the book, there is much debate among philosophers of science—less among scientists, of course—whether “the facts revealed by chemistry, biology, and psychology are all, in some fundamental sense, facts of physics.” To his credit, on the matter of domains of inquiry, the author notes that science can generally do without theories of “human nature,” which again fall to the social sciences and, yes, philosophy. At its best, the book raises provocative questions, but all too often, those questions are—well, in the form of questions, too many piled atop one another: “What do we mean when we say that a theory is simple? Do we mean it is easy to work with? Do we mean it asserts the existence of very few new theoretical entities?” The constant grilling is an annoying professorial tic, and one wishes for less of it.
Readers seeking a more humane, more direct orientation would do well to dust off Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1974), dated but still valuable.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-09748-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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