A Little Book of Big Ideas

Philosophy is one of those subjects deemed too ‘hard’ for us general readers to get to grips with using our rather limited thinking gear. This is largely because the people who practice it are happy for the subject to be seen that way, it preserves the mystique of their chosen discipline and minimises the contact they are obliged to have with the non-intellectual masses.

There are, of course, a few token attempts at inviting the hoi-poloi in for a tour of the intellectual citadel and in book form they tend to fall into two distinct categories, the didactic and the fake-funky.

Books of the first type are more often than not written by people with a genuine desire to teach their audience about the history of philosophy and the work of a millennium’s worth of great thinkers. Their great drawback is that they tend to be textbooks in disguise, meaning that the resulting dry tone puts off most readers not obliged to plough through page after page of obscure terminology as part of their studies.

The authors of fake-funky books about philosophy couldn’t care a fig about teaching their audience anything. What they’re interested in is taking The Matrix, Star Trek or some other handy pop-culture artefact as a peg on which to hang two hundred plus pages of incomprehensible twaddle.

You can, if you’re younger and hipper than I am project a front of moderate coolness by letting yourself be seen reading this sort of book. There is the added bonus that the people you are trying so hard to impress won’t know if you’re talking total nonsense, any more than you’ll know if that’s what the person who wrote the darned book in the first place was doing.

Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy is a different and much better sort of book. Not least because he understands that the true mark of intelligence is being able to explain complicated things simply.

Over forty (very) short chapters, the book runs to less than three hundred pages complete with index, he tells the story of Western philosophy from Socrates to Peter Singer. The restrictions imposed by a lack of space require Warburton to outline the ideas key to the work of each philosopher without resorting to baffling jargon or self important waffle; a challenge he rises to with genuine aplomb.

 Along the way Nigel Warburton explains John Rawls contention that the best way to design a genuinely good society is from a position of not knowing what your own position in it will be; Thomas Aquinas’s use of the Argument of First Cause, that god must exist because without him the chain of cause and effect responsible for creating the rest of the universe could never have begun, amongst other deep thoughts in a lucid and accessible manner. In his hands they are transformed from dusty and difficult ideas only to be approached with caution by experts into living and important arguments to which the general reader can, with a little research, make a contribution

The book does have some minor flaws, for example Warburton’s tone sometimes tips over into the bright cadences of children’s television. It might be amusing to read a description of the perennially cool Jean-Paul Sartre as a ‘small man with goggly eyes’ exposure to too many of these ‘comical’ pen portraits can start to feel like being talked down to. It is also annoying that a book written with the purpose of opening up philosophy to a wider audience doesn’t contain a list of suggested further reading.

These are minor complaints though, once it has a place on your shelf this is a book you are likely to return to repeatedly. As a primer in how the greatest thinkers grappled with the endlessly confounding questions of how we are to live, assuming we do actually exist that is, it is unlikely to be bettered.

A Little History of Philosophy

Nigel Warburton

(Yale University Press, 2012)