The Philosophers edited by Ted Honderich

Introducing Great Western Thinkers

I grabbed this book from the library hoping to give myself a quick introduction to these guys (and they’re all guys) so many people talk about. There are 28 philosophers covered in this volume, from Socrates to Sartre, and each gets a brief treatment in his own chapter.

Each chapter has a different author, so has a different style and a different focus. Most of them give a little bit about the personal background of the philosopher, a very brief description of his major works, and something about the types of arguments he tried to make. I was hoping to finish my reading with a feeling for what each of these great thinkers stood for, to be able to associate a name with a few iconic ideas or defining quotations.

Unfortunately, my experience didn’t quite go that way. After just one reading, I can’t remember most of the philosophical ideas put forward. I don’t remember who was most associated with logic or mathematics or linguistics or metaphysics or whatever. All that I am able to remember are things like these: Just about everything we know about Socrates comes from the writings of Plato, and it’s hard to tell in these writings where Socrates’s ideas end and Plato’s begin. Descartes concluded that he thought, therefore he was (I’m happy for him), and also invented graphing, which probably separates those of us who love math from those of you who hate it.  Marx is largely misunderstood (especially by Marxists). Kant almost never left his hometown. Bentham looked kind of like Ben Franklin. And Schopenhauer could have benefited from a twenty-first century cocktail of anti-depressants (or, as my husband declares, probably even just a cocktail).

I found myself most fascinated by Spinoza and Sartre, and not much interested in all the arguments about how to prove that we, or anything else in the universe, or in our imaginations, actually exists. I found it interesting to see how, historically, Western philosophy has included science, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, and other fields of knowledge and reason that are now their own branches of study (though I don’t mean to imply that science, psychology, etc. cannot have their own philosophy and philosophers.) These days, most of us probably would agree with the statement at the end of the chapter on Wittgenstein by Peter Hacker: “The goal of philosophy is not knowledge but understanding.”

While I wish I could have committed more to memory from a single reading of The Philosophers, the book has a nearly 15-page “Guide to Further Reading” at the end that seems to be quite valuable. As if I needed to expand my list of Books I Should Have Read by Now.

A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now