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Books

Books for Beginners

Jane O’Grady reviews six introductory tomes.

Unlike the neophyte scientist or linguist, the person beginning philosophy in a sense already has all the data he or she needs – her intuitions, or ‘clear and distinct ideas’ as Descartes called them, which are the ultimate court of appeal in reasoning. But philosophy is also a set of defined, refined, cumulative arguments about problems endemic to human existence, and the never-satisfactory solutions to these defined problems which forever force their redefinition. It is also the developed skill of arguing itself. Any introduction to philosophy needs to present philosophical issues in such a way as to tap into the reader’s already-existing but inchoate sense of them without trivialising their depth and complexity.

In the past, perhaps, introductory philosophy teaching, and introductory philosophy books in so far as they existed, erred on the side of presenting philosophy primarily as a series of discrete issues and Great Thinkers, which sometimes failed to connect these either to one another or with the students’ own preoccupations.

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