The Great Philosophers - Introduction

The twelve essays in this collection were originally published, separately, in the ongoing series of monographs entitled The Great Philosophers. They were planned not only as introductions to the work of individual philosophers but also as demonstrations of philosophy in action. Their authors were invited first to give a brief account of the life and thought of their subjects and then to select and examine in critical detail some key aspect of their ideas.

'As a result,' Julian Baggini observed in The Philosopher's Magazine, 'you get a strong impression that ... the writers have really enjoyed the challenge of trying to get over what they really care about in their subjects ... there's no sense that they are begrudgingly reducing their cherished subjects to mere sound bites in the name of popularisation.'

Through inciting our contributors to explore a specific aspect of a philosopher's work, we hoped to avoid the blandness and superficiality that can mark introductory surveys. By choosing contributors who were both experts in their fields and accomplished writers, we sought to sponsor studies that would be at once accessible and authoritative.

Our tally of philosophers to feature in the series was deliberately eclectic. We had, of course, to include the indisputably great names, whose canon is uncontested: Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley and Hume have to be seeded players in any general introduction. However, we also wanted to include those such as Alan Turing and Karl Marx who might, at first sight, seem improbable selections.

In general, what distinguishes our contributors from those who figure in a hundred encyclopaedias and general summaries is their determination to engage the reader by emphasising just one - and not the most obvious - aspect of their subject's thought. David Berman, for example, chose to focus on Berkeley's interest in scientific experimental method. This not only liberated him from plodding through the well-worn arguments for and against Berkeley's Absolute Idealism; it also enabled him to display the philosopher in a fresh light. What is true of Berman on Berkeley is, we believe, true of the other essays in the collection: philosophers are treated as proponents of ideas which retain their vitality, not as the sources of antiquated curiosities.

If Alan Turing's work is little known to most academic philosophers, its importance is established by Andrew Hodges' masterly introduction to his ideas on artificial intelligence. Turing not only laid the foundations of the computer-based technology which will dominate the world in the next century, he also had significant things to say on issues relating to the philosophy of mind. As a somewhat tart counter to Hodges' advocacy of Turing's ideas, Peter Hacker reminds us, with cool eloquence, of Wittgenstein's dismissal of the notion of thoughtful machines. He takes this view not because it is false to ascribe thought to machines, but because it is meaningless. 'Thinking, ' Hacker reminds us, 'is a phenomenon of life. ' Wittgenstein's view was that, while we need not fear that machines will out-think us, 'we might well fear that they will lead us to cease to think for ourselves. '

Contrasting views of this kind are abrasive reminders that great philosophers, whatever their genius, rarely provide definitive answers to problems. They are more likely to stimulate a continuation, perhaps a refinement, of the eternal debates. Nietzsche once said, 'you say there can be no argument about matters of taste? All life is an argument about matters of taste!' Logic, it may seem, it not a matter of taste, but by which logic to read the world is finally a question as much of selection as of inevitability.

The same lesson can be learned from Ray Monk's concise explanation of Russell's philosophy of mathematics. In one way, Monk's is a sorry tale of disappointed hopes (for ultimate certainties), but seen in another way, it clarifies some of the deepest reflections of our time on the nature of mathematics. In this department, as in many others, Russell's achievement was not in providing answers but in articulating, more precisely and more elegantly than before, not only where the difficulties lay but also what kind of issues they raised.

The inclusion of Karl Marx may seem provocative. No one denies the great influence that Marx had on the politics of his time, and ours, but many could, and most do, refuse him any importance as a pure, and moral, philosopher. Through concentrating on Marx's views on freedom, Terry Eagleton can maintain that we should regard Marx's uncertain place in the philosophical register as evidence less of his inadequacies than of a systematic deficiency in traditional attitudes to the subject.

Martin Heidegger has often been regarded by conventional philosophers (especially on this side of the Channel) with something of the same suspicion as Marx. Heidegger's key work, Being and Time, has been denounced as more or less unintelligible. Jonathan Ree's exposition is both elegant and unambiguous; it renders Heidegger's masterpiece accessible without denying its knotty idiosyncrasy.

Frederic Raphael's account, and partial endorsement, of Karl Popper's assault on philosophical historicism could be said to stand to Eagleton on Marx, and Ree on Heidegger, as Hacker's Wittgenstein does to Hodges' Turing. 'Compare and contrast', as the examiners used so often to require, is an enduring and vital habit in human thought. No one can believe without contradiction everything that is said in this anthology. What more salutary introduction could there be to philosophy's endless, and sometimes all too human, search for the truth, or truths?

Ray Monk Frederic Raphael

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