A professor gets a philosophical assist from his young sons.
Most parents are easily impressed with the precociousness of their own children. To listen to them gush, each child is a wise philosopher. Hershovitz, director of the Law and Ethics Program at the University of Michigan, believes they’re right. “Every kid—every single one—is a philosopher,” he writes. “They stop when they grow up. Indeed, it may be that part of what it is to grow up is to stop doing philosophy and to start doing something more practical.” The author uses his kids, Rex and Hank, as evidence of children’s instinct for philosophy. The around-the-house scenes and conversations he presents are equal parts hilarious (for years, Hank kept up a facade of not knowing the alphabet to worry his dad) and profound (4-year-old Rex: “I think that, for real, God is pretend, and for pretend, God is real”). When the author is discussing Rex or Hank, good things happen, but Hershovitz’s real goal is to encourage adult readers to maintain their innate ability to philosophize. So, when one of his kids wonders, for example, if he’s dreaming, it leads to an exposition on epistemology. This is where the book falls a bit flat. There’s nothing wrong with the way Hershovitz presents philosophy; his exposition is clear and lively. But the material consists of the same vogue ideas found in most introductory works of philosophy or, these days, on any podcast with a philosophical bent. If you are already familiar with the trolley problem, philosophical zombies, and the simulation argument, you won’t find anything new in their treatment here. In reading about them, you’ll long for Rex and Hank to return. A philosophical conversation with a child is among life’s great pleasures. If you don’t already know this, Hershovitz’s book will be of assistance.
A playful yet serious introduction to philosophy.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-984881-81-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Categories: PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL NONFICTION
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A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Categories: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
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BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Categories: PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
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