Book Reviews: The Story Of Philosophy, James Garvey and Jeremy Stangroom. A Little History Of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton

THERE are inherent difficulties in creating a continuous narrative about the past two-and-a-half millennia of Western philosophy. It is a subject so diverse that it lacks a clear unity – what, for example, connects the metaphysics of Kierkegaard with the symbolic logic of Frege, to take two examples whose lives briefly overlapped?

Nor is it a narrative of progress and revelation. Locke didn’t supersede Plato in the way that the heliocentric universe of Copernicus supplanted Ptolemy’s world view. Finally, there is the uncomfortable truth that some philosophy is profoundly resistant to simplification. Sartre’s Being And Nothingness does not run to 688 pages because he was stringing it out.

Both these books offer an invaluable introduction to the topic while being fully aware of the caveats mentioned above. Although there is some inevitable overlap – Aristotle’s golden mean, Descartes’ evil demon, Russell’s quandary over the truth of the statement “The present king of France is bald” – what is more striking is the differences between them. Garvey and Stangroom’s book is lavishly illustrated (indeed, it could almost be a companion piece to EH Gombrich’s classic The Story Of Art) and opts for a broadly chronological approach highlighting particular themes.

Warburton’s book is structured as a series of biographies. He begins with Socrates, and very neatly ends with Peter Singer, the author of Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty.

Singer here is not just a contemporary gadfly, but an equivalent of Socrates in the strenuous application of his ethical insights to his own self (and a stark contrast to Schopenhauer, who despite thinking that “harming other people is a form of self-injury” famously pushed his landlady down a flight of stairs to her permanent disability).

Garvey and Stangroom begin earlier with the so-called “Pre-Socratics”, whose thought is not just paradoxical because they exist only in fragments: the dictum of Heraclitus – “you cannot step into the same river twice” (fragment 41) is well known; another saying (fragment 49a) less so – “we step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and are not”.

Garvey and Stangroom bravely end with a speculative chapter on the future of philosophy, highlighting the interplay between philosophy, politics and science, and urging some caution on the idea that neuroscience and evolutionary biology will somehow “solve” questions like personal identity, altruism and the nature of knowledge.

Both books deal elegantly and intelligently with perhaps the most difficult and necessary philosophers, Kant and Hegel (there is an element of truth in the story that on his deathbed Hegel said “there is only one person who has understood me, and he doesn’t understand me”). Kant is the only thinker afforded two chapters in Warburton’s book – one for his metaphysics and one for his uncompromising ethics. The centrality of Hegel highlights another affinity between the books, in that both include Marx and Freud as inheritors of Hegelian thought.

This also raises the elephant in the room: both books avoid any discussion of the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s relationship with the Nazi party has soured his reputation but it should not invalidate his thought. It is particularly surprising in the case of Garvey and Stangroom, given how important the pre-Socratics were to Heidegger.

The ambivalence in both books about Heidegger extends into a more general scepticism about so-called “Continental Philosophy”, the catch-all term to cover writers such as Barthes, Foucault, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Badiou. This is regrettable. All of them follow Marx’s line that philosophy ought to change, not interpret, the world. Yes, they are “difficult”, but the difficulty is poetic. Horace Engdahl, the former secretary to the Swedish Academy, revealed that Derrida was seriously considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Nevertheless, both these books offer clarity, insight and the occasional dash of wit in dealing with how humanity has attempted to understand itself. Readers who find themselves inspired can graduate on to Anthony Kenny’s magisterial New History Of Western Philsophy. «