Twenty Questions : An Introduction to Philosophy (with InfoTrac)

Rating:
Summary: Great introduction into philosophical thought
Review: I ordered this book as a requirement from a great professor during college. Having only read just more than a handful of chapters in that semester I became hooked. I have since moved on and really started to appreciate the ultimate questions of life. Not that this book answers them. That is still the uniqueness of humanity, individual thought. I would highly recommend this to anyone wanting to be a better skeptic. We so readily just accept things that our ancestors accepted without a thought as to how reality really is. The wide array of topics is to be applauded and a great concept to take a look at may arenas of thought. Thank you professor Buenter(Binter).

Rating:
Summary: Create a quantum leap in your philosophical fluency
Review: I recommend this book for the same reasons that others have criticized it. The book is brief, clearly organized, amazingly deep, and covering a wide breadth of common sense questions.

Some members of the philosophical community are not comfortable with this. Some conservative members of the old guard are less interested in creating philosophy so much as studying philosophy that already exists. For them the study of philosophy is an ends in and of itself, whereas it should be a means to the greater end of developing your own philosophical opinions. Actually, philosophical opinions are only useful insofar as they provide a person with a framework to clearly and logically decide what they think about real issues in the world and their life.

This book is all about Applied Philosophy, a phrase I coin to describe the divorce of philosophy from the non-creative, non-applicable academic study that actually discourages people from developing their own opinions. Like Applied Physics it recognizes that the study of philosophy does not necessarily have anything to do with the paramount goal of philosophy: having your very own sound, philosophically based opinions of the world.

After all, what is the value of Aristotle if not to provoke new thinking in people who read his work and had never thought of it before? Is Aristotle the person somehow better than any other man today? Is it that words, simply by virtue of Aristotle speaking them, become true, valuable and immutable? I would take a less theistic approach to the veneration of past philosophers. I would say they are useful and commit their ideas to print so as to provoke others to think like them. Where that provocation comes from, be it Wittgenstein, Napoleon, the Buddha twirling a flower, a schizophrenic's hallucinations, or MTv, what does it matter? The product is all the same: philosophical inspirations, leading to philosophical theory, leading to applied philosophy.

Some entrenched in the academic establishment of Philosophy have a vested interest in not seeing this broad of a philosophical education become the standard. Why? Because they are not themselves trained for independent thought. After all, what need would we have for conventional philosophy teachers if this were the case? Instead, they decry anything that is readable as 'over-simple' and anything that presents philosophy in layman's terms as not serious work, because they suppose that everyone should have to go through what they did to approach philosophy, that it should be difficult and inaccessible, and that it can only come from taking their classes at their universities.

If you want a revolution in education and intelligence, abolishing ignorance, then the solution is to make education and philosophy something that is easy to approach. That is exactly what this book does. It creates a broad survey of philosophy that will familiarize anyone with the issues of philosophy with out an 8-year doctorate.

My favorite articles include Pinker, Kant, Kuhn, and Popper.

Rating:
Summary: A great starting point for a journey through philosophy
Review: This book is used as the primary text in my university's introductory Philosophy course, and I think it's an excellent choice. It includes classic texts written by well-known philosophers and the writings of scientists, novelists, religious figures and many others. The inclusion of philosophical writings from such unlikely sources is a great illustration of how philosophy is woven into all aspects of our lives. Reading this book will help you to realize how many philosophical issues you already deal with in your own life and will also help you to find new ways of thinking about and dealing with them.

Rating:
Summary: A distorted picture of philosophy
Review: This is a terrible book. True, it's hard to go wrong with the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the other great figures represented in this volume. But the editors manage it just the same.

One problem is the length of the selections. There is no way a reader can come to grips with, say, Marx's critique of capitalism or Russell's theory of sense-data after reading a two-page snippet wrenched from its context. Some of the selections are even shorter than this; at least one is only 80 words long. Often the reader is given a philosopher's position on a particular issue, but without getting the arguments for the position! The subtext seems to be that reasons don't matter -- which seems distinctly unphilosophical.

Another problem is the banality of many of the chapter headings. As the title indicates, the book is structured around twenty philosophical questions; each chapter gives the answers of various philosophers to a different question. Chapter 10 is called, "How Should I Feel About Abortion?" This one seems easy to answer -- presumably, everyone feels pretty badly about abortion, regardless of their position on the issue. The more important question, obviously, is how we should *think* about abortion. Chapter 4 is called, "Which Should I Believe: Darwin or Genesis?" This question assumes that there is no way to harmonize Darwin's claims with those found in Genesis. It also assumes that, if they can't be harmonized, there are only two possible positions on this issue. Anyone with a passing acquiantance with the literature on creation and evolution knows just how naive these assumptions are.

Finally, the book's selections reflect a palpable bias toward the extreme left of the political spectrum. For instance, in the chapter on creation and evolution, Duane Gish, an ignoramus, is pitted against Philip Kitcher, a leading philosopher of science. The fight might be fairer had the editors chosen J.P. Moreland, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, William Dembski, or any of a number of other leading critics of naturalistic evolution, rather than a minor figure from the fundamentalist lecture circuit. Another question asks, "Does Religion Give My Life Meaning?" Apparently the answer is NO, since, with the exception of a couple watery selections on Buddhism, all of the other selections in this chapter come from opponents of traditional religion. There is also an emphasis placed on irrationalist views of science, linguistic determinism, and other liberal themes. The editors are entitled to their opinions, of course, but anyone interested in an objective and fair-minded introduction to philosophy should look elsewhere.