How has 2020 been as a year for philosophy books?
There has been an avalanche of philosophy books, many of them excellent. obviously, I haven’t been able to read all of them, but I have read quite a few and skimmed through a few others. It’s been a very strong year for business philosophy books. many great books didn’t make my list as a result of that, which it might have done in years past.
You are reading: Best philosophy books 2020
How did you come up with your selection? What were your criteria for what makes a good philosophy book?
well, I’m thinking of books for a general public, open books, not specialized monographs published in the academic world. I’m always attracted to biography, because I think it’s a very good way to introduce ideas and contextualize them. Too often, I think, academic philosophy operates in a kind of vacuum, largely ignoring the circumstances in which the books were written. obviously there’s the history of ideas, where contextual information absolutely informs interpretation, but there’s a tradition in British philosophy departments, and in some American ones as well, of saying, ‘we can discuss discarding without really knowing much about his environment’ ‘ or “we can read Spinoza’s ethics and figure out what he said just by looking at his arguments.” I feel that it is time to go further. Because biography is such a popular genre, these contextual studies, or books that have a historical aspect, come to the fore in trade books in a way that they don’t so much in philosophy departments.
We have been talking about the best philosophy books of the year for several years: has there been anything new in 2020 compared to previous years?
One thing I’ve noticed is that the number of young female philosophers writing books has increased significantly in the last five years. this is reassuring. It possibly coincides with more women employed in philosophy departments. there is still a terrible imbalance, but there have been positive moves in that direction. This year, of the five books I have chosen, three are about women, but I could have chosen more. I think this is the first year that I could have easily chosen five books written by women as my best books of the year.
In that sense, let’s go to the first book on your best of 2020 list, which is philosopher queens? this fits in with what you were saying about liking biography, as there are a lot of mini-biographies, and it’s also about two young academics: lisa whiting and rebecca buxton. Tell me what you liked about this book.
This is the book of the year for me. Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting are Philosophy graduate students and have co-edited this amazing book, which is basically the book they wish existed when they started thinking about studying Philosophy. is a book that has 20 short essays on significant women philosophers. he is biased towards political philosophy and ethics, which is where his interests lie, but not exclusively, and ranges from ancient greece to more or less today. is a selection of philosopher queens, female philosophers who have been left out of conventional philosophy curricula.
It is also an illustrated book, which is unusual in philosophy. philosophy books with pictures are relatively rare; Hobbes’s Leviathan is an interesting exception with a striking frontispiece. all illustrations are portraits of emmy smith. they are stylized and colorful, almost caricatures of the philosophers. most philosophy book covers, if they illustrate the people they are about, are galleries of bearded guys. it is remarkable to see a book cover that not only visibly shows all women philosophers, but also includes a significant number of women of color. it is quietly a radical book in its selection of the philosophers discussed. I think the illustrations make the point very well, a point that is made explicitly throughout the book, that there are not enough women being discussed in philosophy, and there have been women that we could be discussing in the history of philosophy who have been neglected. largely for sexist or perhaps political reasons.
they have some excellent authors for these short essays and have managed to keep them very, very accessible. Thus, for example, there are short essays by two eminent biographers: Claire Carlisle, who writes here about George Eliot, but has recently written a biography of Kierkegaard; and kate kirkpatrick, whose brilliant biography of simone de beauvoir was one of my picks for best of the year last year. the quality of trials is generally very high. they tend to celebrate, they are not as fussy as many philosophy summaries can be. It is a very positive book.
“I am always attracted to biographies, because I think it is a very good way to introduce ideas and contextualize them”
It was published by unbound, which is a crowdfunded publisher, so it was made possible by sponsors. I guess as a statement of interest, I should say that I made a small contribution and received a hardcover book as a result of that. I love that they managed to get so many people to support their project. that support and enthusiasm has continued after the publication of the book as well. There has been a lot of interest in the press, particularly in France where they continue to appear on television discussing what they have done.
It’s just an amazing achievement and a really beautiful book. what I like about it is that it is an immersive book. I suppose some people will read it from cover to cover, but I tend to dive into it. It includes thinkers who appear less frequently in philosophy polls, such as Angela Davis, a leading civil rights activist with ties to the black power movement. Most philosophy books stray far from including Angela Davis. I think one of the best illustrations in the book is hers. is a beautiful and highly stylized illustration of a black woman with an ‘afro’ in the thinker pose. she is everything that philosophers traditionally are not: a woman, black and young. she is radical and against the establishment. As I mentioned, the images make the plot of the book very well and that image is one that shows what they are doing well. this is a political gesture as well as an informative book. You could give it to any 16-year-old boy who is thinking of studying philosophy and he would get a lot of use out of it. I am very happy to recommend this as my top choice of books of the year. would be a fantastic gift.
i have met four of the people who are illustrated and one that really stood out to me is mary warnock. It captures some of her personality very well, although it’s kind of a caricature of her, in some ways. something in her expression really is her.
I like a point they make in the introduction, that while you could “forgive people for assuming that men have been doing most of the philosophy” for the last 2000 years, Plato himself had a different opinion. .
that’s the title, the queens of philosophy. he is taken out of the republic. Plato wanted his republic to be ruled by rational, independent, well-educated philosopher kings, but he had a place for women in that republic. there could be philosopher queens and women in the army. he was not as sexist as many of his contemporaries. somewhere philosophy got it wrong in terms of how women were treated as sources of ideas.
They also have at least one Chinese thinker in the book, I noticed.
The difficulty with this type of book does not seem to be symbolic. you have to recognize that this is just a selection. there are many other selections. there are many women who are not here who could have been. I mentioned that this selection was biased towards political philosophy and ethics, but there is a really interesting phenomenon in the 20th century of very strong women philosophers in the philosophy of science. none of them manage to get in here. so that’s an interesting omission. I think it just reflects their particular interests as publishers. another book could be written with a completely different list of actors that could be very strong. whether they will or not, I’m not sure.
Let’s move on to the next book in his best philosophy of 2020 selection, which is the meaning of travel by emily thomas.
When I was sent a copy of this book, I thought I knew what it was going to be about, and it wasn’t exactly what I expected. it’s not just a philosophical reflection on what it’s like to take a journey, it’s actually historically informed by what philosophers have done when they’ve traveled and what they’ve thought.
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emily is addicted to travel and has done a lot, including traveling to alaska. that’s pretty amazing, and it shows up in the book. So there’s a personal voice, a personal story, along with this really fascinating investigation of what traveling has meant to various different philosophers and how it has opened up new perspectives and unexpected ways of thinking. for example, one that catches my attention is the meaning of mountains and why they can be attractive places to visit. I had never come across the idea that the beginning of mountain tourism coincided with the view that mountains were God’s work and how that opened up a new way of looking at mountains.
“It is a good time to stop and think about what traveling means to us”
took at a number of topics in the history of travel, from the 17th century onwards, and showed why this is a really interesting and important area for philosophers to consider. The only other book I have previously come across on the philosophy of travel was Alain de Botton’s book, The Art of Travel, which is a much more whimsical and idiosyncratic book on the subject. Emily combines a personal voice with highly informative and well-researched glimpses of individual philosophical travelers. and she has put out a very good book that is aimed at the general public. it’s accessible and entertaining, but it also opens up interesting philosophical insights. It’s very original, that’s one of the reasons I chose it. It’s not the book you’d expect someone to write on the philosophy of travel; like a good trip, it can surprise you. he also has a sense of humor; it is not a heavy book.
It’s the kind of book you might once have read on a long trip, but might actually be more successful due to the inability of most of us to travel right now. It’s a good time to stop and think about what traveling means to us. it’s much more poignant now, when you can’t travel. you may think, ‘what have I lost? those encounters with otherness, how important are they in life?’ and i think emily thomas is arguing, through these case studies, that it is incredibly important and that we neglect it at our peril. There is going to be a huge imaginative and intellectual cost to many of us in being confined to our country or our bubbles.
Let’s talk about book number three on your list of the best philosophy books of 2020, which is Cheryl Misak’s Biography of Frank Ramsey. I have to say I’ve never heard of him, so maybe you could tell us a bit about him and the book.
my phd supervisor hugh mellor, a cambridge philosopher who died this year, was a great admirer of fr ramsey and described him as cambridge’s greatest philosopher. did an excellent radio show about him “better than the stars”. He ranked him above Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. this is a man who died very young, he was only 26 years old. he was a genius, no doubt. he made contributions not only to philosophy, but also to mathematics, game theory, and economics. John Maynard Keynes and Wittgenstein took him seriously when he was an extremely young man, neither of whom put up with fools willingly. he was 19 or 20 years old and they were talking seriously with him as an intellectual partner. he is quite remarkable. they immediately recognized his brilliance. he had such a fertile mind that he spawned these short articles that, 20 or 50 years later, suddenly became the focus of game theory discussions or breathed life into debates about knowledge and belief in philosophy. /p>
His contributions have had these later lives, but unfortunately, and this goes back to biography, they’re often very mathematical, very technical, and it’s not easy for the general public to understand precisely why he was so important. because he was a scholar, they are not alone in one field, so very few people have fully grasped it. economists cling to one part of his thinking, game theorists to another; other philosophers. what cheryl misak has tried to do is put all that together in a biography, a book that is quite long for someone who lived such a short life. She has done something unusual for a biographer, which is to commission various experts to write a brief account of the key contributions Ramsey made in that short life. that’s an interesting decision. I’m not sure I’m completely convinced by that, but I’m not sure how else I could have done it. it would be very difficult for anyone to summarize all of these contributions accurately, so it is perhaps best to have a variety of experts summarize them. these are parts of the book that you can skip, if you wish.
The biography as a whole is really interesting. ramsey was very unusual. he grew up in cambridge and the simplest explanation for how he got to be so smart is that his father was a math teacher who gave him an excellent foundation in math. he excelled at it when he was a student at winchester university. he was a strange boy, very big and then a man and he was very cool. he was politically on the left, involved with the bloomsbury group and their open ideas on sexual relations. he too was involved with psychoanalysis early on. he was an atheist, but his brother, michael ramsey, became archbishop of canterbury. he’s in this setting of early 20th century cambridge, which was a fascinating time with bertrand russell, keynes, and wittgenstein.
among other things, he translated wittgenstein’s treatise from german (he had learned german extremely quickly) and had intensive conversations with him. she came up with a bright line on the tractatus. the famous tractatus ends with the line, “of which one cannot speak, of which one must be silent.” that just means that the things he explains in the book are all that can be meaningfully said, that there is a very limited range of things that can be talked about. everything interesting and important is out of it, which is almost a mystical conclusion. Ramsey said, “What we can’t say, we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it.” wittgenstein used to whistle all the time. he liked to whistle mozart as he walked through the king’s parade. so it’s a joke at wittgenstein’s expense. what he means is that you can’t show something you can’t say. if you can’t really say it, you can’t whistle either. the tractatus is an attempt to whistle it, so to speak.
It is surprising that such a young man should be intellectually so clearly equal to (or perhaps even superior to) someone who has been considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. it is very sad that he died so young. he got sick after swimming in the chamber and it is possible that he caught something there. he died fairly quickly of a fever, but it was unclear exactly what he died of, possibly Weil’s disease.
is cheryl misak a philosopher?
yes, she’s a first-rate philosopher, and she argues that, as well as making contributions in her own right, ramsey persuaded wittgenstein to move in the direction he later moved: the late wittgenstein’s concern for the forms of life and the social context in which the statements were made, moving away from the more austere and logical Wittgenstein of the tractatus. Wittgenstein’s discussions with Ramsey were, she thinks, the triggers for that change. she also backs this up with evidence.
but the book is not only fascinating as a biography of this genius. there are so many interesting features of the world of cambridge in this period just after the first world war.
in the new yorker article you sent me “the man who thought too fast”, lytton strachey, the author of eminent victorians is mentioned saying about frank ramsey that “there was something newton in him”. What does he mean?
I think it’s the clarity of his thinking and his amazing originality. he understood where people had gone wrong and quickly overturned one-way disciplines. I think it’s a tribute to how original it was. Amazing to think of someone so young being seriously compared to Newton.
there are so many absorbing aspects in the book. Lettice Ramsey, Frank’s wife, was an eminent photographer and later photographed Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Cambridge. The other part that stuck with me about the book is that Ramsey’s mother was such a strong and interesting character. she studied history at oxford and was a socialist thinker linked to the suffragettes. I almost wanted another biography of her only her. it was too early for a woman to study at oxford or cambridge; she tends to think of oxford and cambridge as quite conservative places, not radical. it’s interesting to take a look at the left side of cambridge between the wars.
Now let’s move on to Vienna and the murder of Professor Schlick. this is from david edmonds and it’s about the vienna circle. could you tell us why the vienna circle was important and what you like about this book?
the vienna circle was a group of scientists and philosophers who met regularly in vienna to discuss the nature of meaning, trying to clarify what we can mean meaningfully. Wittgenstein was a great influence on them. They were extreme empiricists. they felt that many things that passed for significant claims about the world were, in fact, literally meaningless and should not be given much attention because they could not be verified. they famously dismissed such statements often as metaphysics.
this is most evident in a.j. yesterday’s summary and interpretation of the central ideas of part of the thought of the vienna circle that was published in 1936 as language, truth and logic. yesterday I was a very young man at that time. he had been to vienna and attended the circle meetings, trying to understand what they were discussing. focused on some of the key ideas and then wrote this iconoclastic book where he said that basically, and this is the key idea of the vienna circle, any meaningful statement must be true by definition (like two plus two equals four, or, to take the cliché example, ‘all bachelors are single men’) or empirically verifiable or falsifiable. it’s a two-pronged test of meaning, basically. if it’s not true by definition and there’s no empirical test that can show it’s true or false, then it literally doesn’t make sense.
and when you apply this, as the vienna circle and various other people have tried to do, to areas of philosophy, it turns out that a lot of metaphysics, where people ponder the nature of reality, is everything one or is it infuses the world and so on, it turns out to be literally meaningless and it’s not even good as poetry, because it wasn’t written to be beautiful or rhythmic or whatever.
The members of the circle shared a respect for science, logic and mathematics, and a great desire to find the limits of what can be meaningfully said. It was a movement that had an immense influence on twentieth-century philosophy, not only because of yesterday’s spread of ideas in Britain, but because with the rise of Nazism, in part because many of the thinkers associated with the Vienna Circle they were jewish, and partly due to the effects of the anschluss and after the second world war, the group spread throughout the world, mainly to the united kingdom and america, and continued to have a strong influence there.
david edmonds is my co-podcaster for philosophy bites and also a friend. He is famous for an earlier book, Wittgenstein’s Poker, which is about a dispute that took place in the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. Wittgenstein is alleged to have waved a poker threateningly at Karl Popper and then stormed out. that book is a brilliant exploration of different people’s interpretations of that event and how different people remembered it differently and what was the meaning of the conflict between the two philosophers. That incident reappears in this book, and Wittgenstein and Popper are important characters here as well. this last book is a kind of expansion of the medium, of the context of that dispute. it’s quite complex in the sense that there are many different intertwined life histories involved. many of them have a similar path and many of those paths do not have happy endings.
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what david has achieved is to combine the biographical and historical with the philosophical, without becoming too technical. much of the philosophy of the vienna circle was pretty harsh, but he doesn’t get bogged down in the details. this is a book that is accessible to a general reader. it’s very good at making it clear what the importance of the debates they were having were, what their limitations were, why they were or weren’t influential, as well as telling these stories that connect very strongly with the rise of Nazism, including the assassination of the title of the book. schlick was an important figure in the vienna circle, and he was murdered by a young man with psychiatric problems, but there was a reaction from some people that the murder was not really such a bad thing. so, there is a murder at the heart of the book, there is the rise of nazism, the melting pot of viennese intellectuals, the sense of impending doom that was evident by the political divisions within vienna and the anti-semitism and sympathy of many viennese for the point Nazi view. He made Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s an exciting and dangerous place to be, where ideas really mattered. what went on in the cafes of vienna was not just idle talk, people were passionate about their beliefs. this is the world of freud, it is where wittgenstein came from, karl popper too…
who were the famous names in the vienna circle?
The key figures were Kurt Gödel, the mathematician, probably the most famous, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick. They were inspired not only by philosophy but also by contemporary physics, Einstein and his contemporaries. It’s a really high powered thing. David has chosen a different route than Cheryl Misak. He has not invited experts on the particular Vienna Circle papers to say why the particular positions they took were important, but he has given an overview, a flavor, and an assessment.
the strange thing is that it has always been recognized in british philosophy how important the vienna circle was in understanding the way philosophy developed in the 20th century in britain, the united states, australia and other parts of the world, but there have been very few books covering this movement. there’s a recent book on the vienna circle, accurate thinking in insane times, but not much else.
And the ideas of the Vienna Circle? what happened to them?
david’s view is that ultimately the core ideas of the verification principle in its strict formulation failed on their own terms. it is not even clear that the verification principle itself has passed its own meaning test. however, what he calls “the self-identifying merits of analytic philosophy,” such as its “meticulous attention to logic and language and quest for clarity, contempt for grandiosity and rejection of nonsense… of arguments that are based on ‘feeling’ or ‘intuition’ over substance” – all these characteristics of this iconoclastic movement and the way in which its members did philosophy have undoubtedly had a later life in academic philosophy and will continue to do so. The Vienna Circle helped foster a climate where “they are taken so much for granted that they are virtually invisible.”
There are also a number of tragic personal stories in the book. it’s like sad music is a quite moving book.
David Edmonds also has another book out this year, co-written with Bertie Fraser and aimed at a younger age group (9-12), called Undercover Robot. my kids really enjoyed it and I think you wanted to mention it.
yes, david has published two books this year. I thought the undercover robot, which I wanted to mention in passing, was also excellent. is a story about an intelligent robot. it’s very witty, with plenty of inside jokes that adult philosophers will spot when reading it to their children.
We are already at the last of the books of your best philosophy of the 2020 selection. This is metazoos by peter godfrey-smith.
peter godfrey-smith wrote other minds, a best-selling book on octopuses in which he argued that these soft, short-lived, rubbery animals really are like an alien life form. he is an Australian philosopher who is also a scuba diver and diver. he goes out to the outskirts of sydney, dives a lot and watches carefully. other minds it was a mixture of science, philosophy and personal observations. he explained how the complexities of the octopus’s nervous system produce an animal that is capable of complex behavior despite only living a few years, mostly alone. it is an animal that learns a lot, that seems to have independent minds in its different tentacles, but it has a mind or minds very different from ours. that book is a philosopher’s version and it was brilliant.
This new book, metazoa, is about animal minds and the birth of consciousness. It is a much more ambitious book, because it talks about the entire animal kingdom and how nervous systems have evolved, the ways in which various animals act in the world and how these have given rise to different types of consciousness. his central theme is sentience, the ability to feel things, to have a point of view about the world, and he’s trying to understand how that comes up in the story of animal development and what animals could be said to have a point of view about the world. this is something of a spoiler, but the surprising conclusion is that insects, and some apparently quite primitive aquatic animals, have that way of acting in the world, of feeling and reacting to stimuli, that justifies thinking of them as if they were a continuous with human minds.
what makes this book so interesting to me is the combination of the first person and the more scientific and philosophical analysis. I have already mentioned that the author is a diver. he is brilliant at describing what he sees, the behavior patterns of the animals he observes, whether they are small worms or pieces of coral, sharks, whales or whatever. I found that reading the book stimulated me visually. it includes some photographs, but the verbal descriptions are so evocative that they are hardly needed. It’s a bit like the way Oliver Sacks had a great ability to describe and reflect on things.
That first-person description, while delightful on its own terms, I also think it’s an important part of the book’s plot, because it would be hard to persuade someone of an animal’s mind without some idea of how that animal it finds itself and moves in the world. he is such a brilliant and close observer of the way animals behave that this is entirely convincing. and then take a step back and reflect, from a philosophical point of view.
strongly opposes the idea that minds are things that can simply be loaded like computer programs, that they are just relationships between neurons that could be instantiated in some other kind of system. his approach is much more tied to the flesh of animals, so to speak, it’s much more intimately connected to evolutionary development and how neurons have developed, and how animals operate in the world, and how minds are connected to the action and particular types of action, and the complexities of the nervous systems that develop, that facilitate survival in different environments.
So, would you be skeptical about being able to upload your brain to a computer?
yes, certainly with computers at the moment. he thinks that’s not a useful way to think about minds and consciousness. he is approaching these issues from a completely different direction, as a philosopher-biologist-naturalist, giving an evolutionary explanation. but it is subtle that, as I said, he combines first-person observation with the findings of scientific research. he gives you some science and he gives you some philosophy, but all in a very acceptable way.
Another thing I like about the way you write is that you don’t pretend you know when you don’t. he is speculative, but still skeptical. he will speculate, for example, on the way certain types of brains establish wave patterns beyond the electrochemical reaction between individual cells. there are waves of electrical energy passing through a complex system like a brain and he ponders what the meaning of that might be, but he doesn’t say he knows, because science hasn’t really determined. he has enough humility not to affirm things that he cannot substantiate, and you see him reflecting. It’s really interesting. it’s almost as if you’re witnessing an intelligent person wrestling with ideas in front of you, rather than simply presenting the conclusion they’ve come to as an absolutely true result about the world.
I’m sure some people will criticize him for selecting some animals to reflect on and not others, but he is a unique voice within philosophy. there are few philosophers who have such intimate knowledge of animal behavior. he obviously has a bias towards marine animals, that’s his passion. and so he moves much faster when he talks about animals on dry land. I think the real strength of the book is in the parts where we’re underwater.
It’s a great book. It doesn’t give you the last word, but it is a book that makes you think differently about animals that you might have assumed were more like little robots than they probably are. and couldn’t resist including a chapter on octopuses. he is passionate about understanding the behavior of the octopus. he is not sentimental with them. he doesn’t think they’re intelligent in the sense that we’re intelligent, but it’s just that they have certain kinds of minds that are on a continuum with ours. he’s not claiming that they’re super intelligent because they can solve some puzzles, but he suggests that they might have nine minds, which is kind of weird, kind of like a central control system and then eight more minds, one in each tentacle. They act both independently and in a coordinated manner. it’s such an interesting way to think about a different kind of mind than our own.
part of our best books of 2020 series.
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