The Best Philosophy Books of 2016

YOU ARE READING: The Best Philosophy Books of 2016 | Five Books AT PhebinhvanhocEN

what has been happening with philosophy books in 2016? Has it been a good year?

During the last decade there has been a great growth in popular philosophy. The result is that you not only get general introductions to philosophy, but also some significant books that deal with important philosophical questions. they are written by philosophers, but aimed at the general public, so don’t use too technical language or too many footnotes. This year has been a good year for this type of book.

You are reading: Best philosophy books 2016

Let’s see what those important philosophical questions might be talking about the books you’ve chosen. so of the best philosophy books of 2016, the first to make your list is about the philosophy known as “existentialism”. it’s from sarah bakewell and it’s called in the existentialist cafe.

This is the best philosophy book I’ve read this year. it’s exceptional sarah bakewell wrote a brilliant book on montaigne, several years ago, which won several awards. I think in some ways this book is even better. explains the philosophy and places it in time, but does so with a very light touch.

what he has managed to do is combine the history of predominantly french existentialism (focusing on sartre and de beauvoir as well as merleau-ponty) with digressions on heidegger and others. she combined that with some autobiographical elements and a real passion for the subject.

“existentialism puts individual freedom and choice at the center of what it is to be human.”

She is a very skillful writer and draws you in through anecdotes and little glimpses into the lives of these philosophers, mixing it all up in a way that makes it seem so effortless. but I know, as a writer, how difficult it is to achieve, and only a truly exceptional writer could combine so many biographies, so many different philosophical positions, sometimes quite complex, and still tell a plausible and compelling story. she has done that, which is quite remarkable.

by doing this, you are resurrecting sartre and 1940s existentialism, which is, in a way, considered old-fashioned, especially in france. the result is to empower people to read. so I think this is a great book. everyone should read it.

It’s very readable, isn’t it? It has a rather talkative tone, which you wouldn’t expect in a book about a very heavy and convoluted philosopher like Martin Heidegger, shall we say. I like the way he describes him always going to the black forest, near where he lives, and arguing that his philosophy is a bit like the roads that run through it.

There is a particular kind of novelistic touch that you have when you look at things. The beginning of the book is the famous story about Sartre being inspired by the idea that he could philosophize over an apricot cocktail. This was part of the phenomenological movement—as he understood it—coming from Husserl: the idea that part of doing philosophy is accurately describing your perceptions and experiences, and that will somehow reveal the essence of things. accurate description is at the heart of philosophy and can put aside any questions about what exists and big metaphysical questions like that. That idea also inspired some of Sartre’s most brilliant passages in his book Being and Nothingness.

sarah bakewell has quietly caught it and is very adept at this kind of description.

I should add that sarah bakewell has also done an interview on five books. for people who want to understand the basics of existentialism, it could also be quite useful reading. I think that’s the first interview you did for our site, way back in 2013.

It was a very interesting interview. she hadn’t read the book at the time, because she was still writing it and, in a sense, that’s part of the workings of the book that is revealed there. but the book is much more complex than that interview, as it intertwines the various elements.

“Accurate description is the heart of philosophy and you can put aside any questions about what exists and big metaphysical questions like that. ”

In the book, he takes seriously Heidegger’s dark history of Nazism and, in particular, what emerges from his black notebooks, which reveal him to be even more anti-Semitic and anti-humanist than we had imagined. Sarah Bakewell manages to acknowledge that with due disgust, and yet she acknowledges the good qualities that part of Heidegger’s philosophy has, something I find difficult to do myself.

sarah started a doctorate on heidegger, so she knows a lot about him, but she uses her scholarship very lightly. I know, because I have told you about several of the figures in this book, that what is in the book is the surface. the underlying research is very, very deep, and she is completely up on the subject of hers.

You said that existentialism is a bit old fashioned. why should it be relevant today?

existentialism puts individual freedom and choice at the heart of what it is to be human. you have to acknowledge your responsibility and recognize that many of us are in what sartre calls “bad faith” most of the time, pretending that we are less free than we really are. so we assume that we have to take on particular social roles, or behave in a certain way, because we are expected to. then we think of ourselves as chains. but sartre says that’s still an option.

“the book exemplifies the power of philosophy to influence people to live a certain way”

This is an interesting position today, in part because it is so threatened by neuroscience. The dominant view in neuroscience is that we are much less free than we think we are, at least when it comes to conscious decision-making: the opposite of Sartre’s message. he argued that we are freer than we think we are.

Is it a useful way for someone to think about their life?

speaking personally, as sarah does in her book, it is a philosophy that has influenced the way i live and has shaped some of the decisions i have made in my life. I was very inspired by reading Sartre’s existentialism and humanism when I was 18.

sarah talks about how existentialist writing inspired her, just like she talked about how finding montaigne’s book of essays inspired her when she wrote that book. in a sense, the book exemplifies the power of philosophy to influence people to live a certain way because it tells you their life through it. he does it in such a comprehensive way that it’s hard not to be drawn in and feel that, yes, philosophy—analytic philosophy as practiced in most British, American, and Australian universities—is a bit dry and misses the point with quite frequently; while existentialism may have been quirky and quite technical in its worst forms, but it raised the big questions. it focused on real issues about how we should live, made individual experience highly relevant, and encouraged accurate reflection on our own conscious experience and what it means, where we sit in the world, and where we are in relation to other people. and our own death.

so existentialism cannot be blamed for the themes it chooses. it goes to the heart of the human condition and does not get caught up in language games or distracted by nitpicking. in its worst forms, it can be very technical and austere, with some of its exponents going a bit too far; but at its best, it’s a sincere attempt to make sense of the world we find ourselves in.

I am very attracted to the atheist current of existentialism. starts from the position that there is no god and asks what we should do. How can we make sense of what we find around us? nothing is closed by divine law, and we see evil all around us. how should we think about that? how should we act?

another aspect of existentialism that sarah highlights is its commitment to action. it is not a philosophy of simple reflection and description. Most existentialist philosophers were active in the world politically and ethically in various ways and through the way they lived their lives. they tried to live their philosophy, much as the ancient Greek philosophers were trying to live their philosophy.

talking about philosophy as a way of living your life clearly leads us to your next choice, peter singer’s book, ethics in the real world. this is a collection of articles, isn’t it, many of them from your project union column, on a range of different topics, from new years resolutions to aids in south africa.

my selection of books is quite peculiar. These are the top five philosophy books I’ve read this year, but I’ve excluded the more technical scholarly monographs because I think it’s appropriate that we focus on books that a general reader would find interesting.

for me, peter singer is one of the best living stylists in philosophy. very few people realize this. people rarely comment on his writing style, but he is the most lucid of writers. he writes about complex issues very succinctly, very calmly, so that his writing is almost transparent to what he is saying. he is not extravagant. he is almost invisible. he manages, in these essays, to tackle really deep questions in just two or three pages, often saying more than other people say in a whole book.

“There is an evangelical aspect to his philosophy and he has many followers. ”

is controversial, of course. he is a utilitarian thinker: he constantly emphasizes that you must measure things by their consequences. he wants to have an impact on the world and has, for example, certain assumptions about the importance of non-human animal experience relative to human beings, assumptions that other people may not share. but whether or not you agree with him, it is very difficult to misunderstand him. his writing is so clear and his arguments are so well expressed that you can interact with him.

for me, he is the ideal kind of philosopher to read because he is provocative. you have very strong views, which you stand for, and you know what you stand for. and if you agree with him, great, you’ve learned something and reinforced it. but if you don’t agree, all the better, because his writing forces you to think. he’s been doing it particularly in the area of effective altruism: this movement that aims to use charitable donations as efficiently as possible, identifying pound for pound where you can get the most bang for the buck. several of these essays pick up on that.

“Australia has produced a large number of excellent philosophers per capita. ”

I don’t completely agree with that approach. but it is very stimulating. He has thought of almost all the counterarguments. you need to see what it says and think it through if you want to hold the opposite position.

Do you see him as the greatest living philosopher, as he is sometimes described?

It is very difficult to compare philosophers with each other. It’s not like we’re talking about sprinting, where you can measure who won the 100m at the Olympics or the World Championships, see their fastest time, and then say, ‘Okay, Peter Singer is the best.’

but, for me, he is without a doubt one of the most interesting living philosophers. partly because he is so consistent. he is prepared to state his views, argue them and follow through with his consequences. he is prepared to bite the bullet. when questioned, “doesn’t your view of him lead to the consequence that under some very exceptional circumstances, some kinds of torture might be justified?”—many people would say he can’t go there. but he will say that he does follow. It must be very rare that such circumstances exist, but if they did and you knew they existed, then he would follow.

Does your controversy stem from your utilitarianism? say in the article in this book, about thabo mbeki refusing to admit hiv causes aids. he’s saying, ‘ok, mbeki killed more people because of this view on hiv/aids than the entire apartheid regime, so how do we compare these two?’ that’s what he’s measuring. Is that the kind of thing a utilitarian does, count the number of dead people?

There are many different forms of utilitarianism. the basic principle is that it focuses on the consequences of actions and not intentions (although intentions can also have consequences, in terms of how other people perceive what you do if you express them, for example).

This is the case of someone who, without an explicit intention of causing the death of people, through their actions has done so. utilitarianism, traditionally, looks for a currency that can measure different actions through the probable consequences and plays with those different consequences. weighing consequences against each other is the basic benefit of utilitarianism.

can determine the best course of action because it is the one with the best consequences, or is most likely to have the best consequences. so if you take that really seriously, if you had to choose a world without apartheid, or a world without this mbeki statement, the world without mbeki would be better (in terms of lives lost), even if it had apartheid. There could be other negative consequences of apartheid, certainly there were, but on that factor alone, a consequentialist approach would lead to that conclusion.

Obviously, in some situations, the consequences are incredibly important. but the obsession with consequences can seem inhuman in many situations. it’s a kind of direct cost-benefit analysis, and when applied to people close to you, it seems incredibly cruel and lacking in compassion.

So compassion isn’t important?

utilitarians find value in compassion, but above all they celebrate a clinical evaluation of the results. I think that, in a sense, that is both the strength and the weakness of the approach. the strength is that if you’re dispensing scarce resources, you probably want a clinical, detached point of view where people figure out the best use of those scarce resources. but if you’re talking about what you need for your nearest and dearest and someone tells you, ‘the system doesn’t allow that,’ that seems incredibly inhumane, cruel even. doesn’t seem to recognize the power of close individual bonds.

“Whether you agree with him or not, it’s very hard to misunderstand him.”

I don’t sympathize with all of Peter Singer’s conclusions, but I always admire his willingness to debate with people who disagree with him. some people have forbidden him to speak. not without reason, some disability rights movements have felt that some of the conclusions it has reached, about terminating pregnancies of children known to have severe disabilities, are an attack on disability and They protested very strongly. there are people who want to close it. but he is always ready to argue. he doesn’t try to shut down the other side, he wants to have the debate.

You asked me if he is the greatest living philosopher. he is certainly an example of what I consider to be the best kind of philosopher, which is someone who presents positions and is prepared to defend them, and to do so in a public way that allows other people to disagree and debate. and the conversation to continue.

He has also led an ethical life. As far as we know, even when he was a low-level academic, he donated a portion of his annual income to charity, to help the developing world. In one of the articles in this book, he talks about raising his children and states: “we should aspire for our children to be good people and lead ethical lives.” That got my attention. If you asked most people what they wanted for their children, they would say, “oh, I want them to be happy.” I am quite interested that he, as a philosopher interested in ethics, is living an ethical life.

It’s definitely true that you want to live by the principles you stand for. he also wants other people to do it. there is an evangelical aspect to his philosophy, and he has many followers.

Many thousands of people have converted to vegetarianism and veganism because of their arguments. many people have also been convinced by his arguments about the effective uses of charitable donations. they have led people to give up promising academic careers and go to work in the city to generate more income, which they can then distribute charitably. it has prompted some extremely wealthy people to make very significant donations to medical research and medicine-based charities. It has had a great effect on the world. it would be hard to think of another philosopher who has had a comparable impact for good on the world. this is debatable, of course, because some economists say that some charitable giving is counterproductive. but it has certainly generated the income, and some of its actions have certainly produced very good results.

His critics would say that some of his pronouncements on ethics have also had dire effects, changing people’s minds about infanticide and abortion, in particular.

Obviously Socrates was executed, so if you’re a philosopher and you make statements, you run the risk of getting into trouble.

very few philosophers today, in britain and america, are at risk for their philosophy. should say britain, america and australia. Peter Singer is Australian, and Australia has produced a large number of excellent philosophers per capita. people often talk about the Anglo-American tradition. I think they should talk about the Anglo-American-Australian tradition, possibly not in that order.

it’s amazing how few philosophers writing today say anything that could ruffle someone’s feathers to the point where they would come out and try to kill you. that hasn’t been the case historically, and maybe this could lead to the next book.

Yes, next on your list of the best philosophy books of 2016 is The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb.

This book gives us insight into the world of the early Enlightenment, when many prominent philosophers risked excommunication, exile, or even execution for their views. these were people who were writing, knowing full well that their views were considered heretical by the church, threatening by monarchs, and possibly even sacrilegious by the general public. many of them were persecuted from one country to another. I’m thinking particularly of Rousseau, I wasn’t sure where he went, but there are several philosophers in this book whose lives were severely affected by threats from the church and the powers that be.

“This was a world that was really dangerous to think about.”

locke went into a kind of self-imposed exile due to his writings and political associations; Hume couldn’t get a job at a university because he was supposed to be an atheist or at least antagonistic to the church; voltaire was put at risk by various people at various times.

This was a world that was really dangerous to think about. Kant described the Enlightenment as a time when people dared to think. the word ‘dare’ is important. It wasn’t just that they were being bold in thinking for themselves, there was real risk associated with it. To be a philosopher in that period—to be an original philosopher prepared to follow arguments as Spinoza did, for example—was an extremely courageous thing to do, in the same sense as Socrates standing in Athens expressing views that his countrymen thought were heretic, it was an act of bravery and resulted in his death.

anthony gottlieb is a former executive editor of the economist and, unsurprisingly, another very good writer. writing on philosophy is very, very important because it can be difficult to read about philosophical ideas. anything the writer does to help the reader is extremely valuable.

This book is the continuation of The Dream of Reason, which takes philosophy from the ancient Greek and Roman period, and then quickly through the medieval period. but either book can be read on its own.

gottlieb talks about philosophers from rené descartes to almost kant. Rousseau is the last philosopher treated in detail in the book. It’s basically the 16th to the 18th century, which, in many ways, was a second golden age for Western philosophy, after Plato and Aristotle flourished in Athens and, before them, Socrates.

It’s quite intriguing that a book about such a well-covered period, the Enlightenment, is on your list of the best philosophy books of 2016.

I don’t know of a better survey from this period. What Gottlieb manages to do is add just enough of the lives and backstory to stimulate your understanding of the philosophy, and enough of the philosophy not to get too technical or obscure. again, it’s a book that required a very light touch to pull off in such a successful way. that’s probably invisible to someone who hasn’t tried doing the same kind of thing. I have tried to write a history of philosophy: it is not as easy as it seems.

There is also an original aspect in the book. there are some things I learned from him that I didn’t know. Take Spinoza, who was cursed by a herem, the Jewish equivalent of excommunication, because of his heretical views, which some took to be an atheist. he spoke of ‘god or nature’: nature is god, indeed, it is not an orthodox view. It is commonly assumed that, after the excommunication, Spinoza lived on his earnings as a lens polisher. there is a romantic idea of him in his room, polishing these lenses for the first telescopes. Apparently that’s not quite right. Gottlieb relies on research showing that this was not his main source of income, although he did make lenses. A more important and unusual aspect of the book is that he has devoted an entire chapter to Pierre Bayle, who does not usually figure so prominently in these historical accounts. gottlieb makes a good case for bayle as a very interesting contributor to enlightenment, particularly in his defense of free speech and tolerance of other people’s ideas, the kind of thinking for which voltaire is famous.

is a big aspect of the philosophy of this time, then, atheism: basically all these philosophers are rejecting religion and heading towards atheism?

not all do it explicitly. For example, Descartes was, as far as we know, a devout Catholic. Leibniz, I think, he was also religious. Rousseau was probably a deist. deism was a fairly common position for heretical thinkers. this is the idea that there is no personal god, but there was a god who created the world, and there is evidence of god in the world.

Instead of atheism, I think there is often a resistance to truth on the part of authority. that is one of the characteristics, I think, of the so-called illustration. people were beginning to get important empirical evidence from science; they were beginning to reason about different societies and would gain evidence from travellers’ accounts. the world did not have to be as the religious authorities described it. So philosophers who were trained to reason, argue, and think about the nature of reality often came into conflict with the church, and some of them, like Voltaire, were particular antagonists of the church.

Some scholars have argued that David Hume was definitely an atheist, but, from his writings, there is still a case to say that he was not quite an atheist as we would understand it. he was someone who didn’t think he knew the answer and he didn’t think that people who thought they knew the answer knew the answer either, but he also believed that there was more and better proof that god doesn’t exist than that he does. , and who did not like the influence of the church. Personally, I think Hume was an atheist at the end of his life. however, most of the thinkers in this book were probably not outright atheists. that was a pretty weird position to take in the 18th century.

I’m intrigued by the theme of your next book, anger and forgiveness. This is from the American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum. why do you like this book?

This is a very interesting book. Martha Nussbaum began as a classical philosopher and has immersed herself in ancient philosophy. she has read a lot in literature. she is politically engaged and travels extensively, often to india. she has a wide range of experience and understanding through life and books that she brings to this book.

Behind him hides Seneca: the Roman philosopher who said that anger was a useless emotion. what nussbaum argues in the book is that there is something confusing about what we think we will get out of our emotion of anger. we feel anger, anger is often used in political contexts, and anger is often praised: we feel that we should feel angry about how people have been treated, about injustice. she argues that we must go beyond anger and the associated desire for revenge, and that it usually exacerbates the evil in a situation rather than eliminate it. it’s often more about getting a good feeling out of expressing anger than it is about generating beneficial results of the kind we claim to want to achieve.

That’s a great idea, but how do you go about showing it off?

think about what happened after apartheid in south africa. you may have expected a situation where there would be retaliation, justifiable humiliation of people who committed torture and murder, and harassed people. this retributive approach would have been very natural for most people. the world almost expected revenge. instead, we had nelson mandela’s truth and reconciliation commission. choosing a civilized process, not directly lenient but transparent, to come to terms with what had happened was, in the eyes of most people, a better solution.

“Justice is a human invention. it’s not a natural fact that if someone hurts you, you have to hurt them back in proportion to the damage they caused you.”

martha nussbaum defends a new stoicism in society. Stoicism implied control of the emotions and not giving in to irrational passions when they could produce no benefit. in society, we must contain anger, contain something that comes very easily to most of us. we will produce a better world looking for other solutions.

But what about justice? if we give up anger, then there is no justice.

There is no justice in the sense of an eye for an eye, but there is a question as to whether that is the best vision of justice. justice is a human invention. it is not a natural fact that if someone hurts you, you have to hurt him back in proportion to the damage he caused you. true, many of us are predisposed to behave that way, but we can resist that temptation. what martha nussbaum is inviting us to do is take a step back and ask, does it really make a better situation than some alternative and more restorative approaches to wrongdoing? Ultimately, the message of the book is that love is better than hate.

The book is stimulating a debate on how we should respond to irregularities. it is an important book, it is beautifully written and draws on a wide range of sources, but it is not the last word on the subject. he is someone who presents an interesting position, defends it, defends it, sincerely believes in it. that opens up a conversation we otherwise wouldn’t have had. That, for me, is the great value of philosophy: that it allows and encourages thinking. it doesn’t just present a prepackaged view that you have to learn.

Anger is such an important topic. everyone has felt it in their personal lives, in everyday life and in their relationships. now, in the age of the internet, we also see it online: the anger and the angry comments. We see it in politics. it’s something we deal with every day in some way. but it is not something one normally thinks about philosophically. Not being a philosopher, I can safely say that it would never have occurred to me to think philosophically about anger.

The nice thing about the way Martha Nussbaum does it is that she can draw on some of the great philosophy of the past. he knows the classical texts very well and has read them in Latin and Greek. these topics were much discussed in ancient philosophy. so there’s a really interesting way to feed back into the current debate. philosophy can be very good at renewing your past and making it relevant to the present, and that goes for my final choice of book as well.

which is the way: what Chinese philosophers can teach us about the good life. It has two different subtitles, actually, in England and America. the alternative is a new way of thinking about everything. in any case. Whether you’re learning about the good life or thinking about everything: why is it on your list of the best philosophy books of 2016?

Within academic departments of philosophy there is a conventional canon that ranges from the pre-Socratics to contemporary philosophy and largely excludes Eastern philosophy. that is dismissed as religion or household wisdom. that’s the caricature, but there is an element of that, certainly in the career I studied and that many people study.

and there is an argument for that, because there is a causal influence from plato through the medieval philosophers to the present. It is a particular story in which Confucius and Mencius and various other Chinese philosophers do not have much involvement. There is debate as to whether any Buddhist philosophy could possibly have come through Schopenhauer and perhaps even earlier in Hume’s writings on the self. but, in general, Eastern philosophy has not had much of an impact on that particular history, although Arab translators and philosophers were responsible for preserving some of the key Greek philosophy.

And yet there are a number of very rich traditions in Eastern philosophy, and they are pretty much ignored by most Western philosophers, as I confess, so am I. they may have read some Confucian writings, but have little idea what the best of Chinese philosophy might look like.

“philosophy can be very good for renewing your past and making it relevant to the present”

the path is very interesting because it is written for a popular audience. it’s a very easy read, but it makes Chinese philosophy quite fresh. It is written by a Harvard academic who organized a Chinese philosophy course that was incredibly popular with students. so he has found ways to bring people into the subject. the great focus is on how you should live. That is the basic question in philosophy, the question that Socrates asked himself. It is not a trivial question, nor is it easy to answer.

What he does in the book is run through a series of answers given by Chinese philosophers in a way that makes them seem, at least to me, part of the same activity as the greats of Western philosophy. he speaks, in particular, of the philosopher mencius, who worked in a Confucian tradition. Mencius made some important points about cultivating virtue, starting with family and how important it was to recognize your place within the family before trying to widen the circle to include other people.

so chinese philosophers are addressing the kind of questions peter singer addresses, for example about how much care we should give to people beyond our inner circle. but they do it in very interesting ways.

This is not the last word. I’m not in a position to judge it as an academic work on Chinese philosophy, but one thing it does make you want to read more about Chinese philosophy. that’s another thing a good introductory book should do. it should not leave you satisfied, it should leave you dissatisfied, feeling that there is something more you want to discover, something more you want to learn. so one book leads to another, and this book certainly leads to other books.

you were a little nervous about including el camino among your best philosophy books of 2016 because you thought it was a bit self-help. I know that this is something that you are passionate about, that philosophy is not self-help. can you explain?

There are some popular philosophy writers right now whose books could just as easily be in the self-help sections of bookstores as they are in the philosophy section. some have their origin in Roman philosophy, which placed a great emphasis on studying philosophy to improve the way you live. To me, the problem with that is not so much that people are writing these books, but that they give the impression that this is essentially philosophy: a set of psychological techniques drawn from great thinkers of the past that will make things better. for individuals. on the contrary, I see philosophy as an investigation: you cannot prejudge the result. it is a continuous inquiry about how things are and what is the best way to deal with them; but you cannot know in advance that after that investigation, thinking about the nature of reality, the limits of your knowledge and the best way to live, will actually improve your life or make you happier than you would have been otherwise. . could make things worse. you can glimpse the abyss and find life unbearable.

“perhaps we would lead happier, more fulfilling lives if we just followed some simple ‘godly’ rules about how to behave, even if these are entirely human fabrications.”

perhaps it would have been better not to spend so much time reading philosophy books. perhaps it would have been better not to recognize that there are no preexisting values that shape our lives and no easy solutions to questions about how we should live. maybe we’d lead happier, more fulfilling lives if we just followed a few simple “godlike” rules about how to behave, even if these are entirely human fabrications.

philosophy can take you away from blissful ignorance. some people who study philosophy move away from religious faith and trust in traditional ways of life; Certainties about how we should live are taken away from them. so it seems presumptuous to me to say that studying philosophy will make your life better, or even be, at bottom, a form of self-help. it could be self-destructive. could be disruptive. there are cases of people who have studied philosophy in depth and very seriously who have collapsed as a result.

“I see philosophy as an investigation: you cannot prejudge the result.”

It’s the kind of topic that, if approached honestly, leaves you fundamentally uncomfortable on some level, because most of the things you take for granted are called into question, and there may be no certainties to put them back on track. its place. . There may be some comfort in knowing that you have made an effort to understand what is really going on, of course, but success in understanding is not guaranteed as the human intellect is so limited. Socrates made it clear that his strength lay in knowing how little he knew, not how much, therein lay his wisdom. there’s an important message there.

philosophy aims to give a clearer picture of how things are and how we can live better. may or may not achieve those things. it is an ongoing conversation that aims to reduce our ignorance, a topic with a 2,500-year history. it’s not a matter of tidy little answers that, if applied to your love life, will bring amazing results. If that’s what you want, I recommend studying empirically tested psychology. philosophy is still a wonderful subject, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want anyone to stop exploring it. but we must recognize it for what it is.

Other content

The Best Philosophy Books of 2016 | Five Books

Leave a Reply Cancel reply