Rating: 
Summary: Nice Survey of Modern Philosophy
Review: Those unfamiliar with Kimball's work will be surprised to find out that essays which explore the intellectual and moral lives of various century-old writers and philosophers can actually be quite accessible and entertaining. This is Kimball's best quality as a writer: his ability to pull himself above the jumble of scholastic dissertation when covering subjects that usually invite prolix pontification and (in today's academic environment) wild speculation.
Kimball is especially good at deciphering philosophy; he has a knack for relating an individual philosopher's ideas to the world of philosophy in whole. He also has the intellectual restraint to investigate the relationships between the philosopher's ideas and the philosopher's personal life without drowning in the vague conjecture of Freudian interpretation. (We can hope for Kimball to produce a Durant-style survey of philosophy some day).
Lives of the Mind deals mainly with philosophers, mainly from the Modern era, and it shows Kimball at his best. The compositional nature of the book, a collection of original essays and book reviews, gives the book uneven pacing and a disappointing lack of structure. After a first reading, however, most readers will keep the book on the shelf for the occasional glimpse into the individual essay, and the book serves this purpose well.
Some readers may also complain that Kimball rarely gives a pronounced judgment about which intellectuals use and which abuse. One reviewer on Amazon contends that Kimball shows Wittgenstein as an abuser of intelligence; I came to the opposite conclusion after reading that chapter. This, rather than being a shortcoming, shows Kimball's judicious treatment of his subjects as he avoids forcing these complicated lives and ideas into becoming the servants of a narrow political agenda. I give this book a solid B.
Rating: 
Summary: Men and modern despicabilities
Review: Yesterday I wrote a review of this book in which I treated it as a book on this topic might expect to be treated, if everyone was always in good humor. However, upon reflection, wit is a problem that I hardly considered as such, along with the possibility that some people might actually hate this book as much for the things it says as for the general tendency to object to outrageous wit in spite of our appreciation for what it can do.In my own case, I find it disturbing that a vivid young man on the first page of the chapter on Descartes, who once said, "I really don't see what someone who lived in the seventeenth century could possibly tell us about the modern world" (p. 81) is considered typical of modern ignorance, when that young man might have been born with a brain, studied the main lessons which philosophy has drawn from the MEDITATIONS or DISCOURSE ON METHOD by Descartes, and still considered it outrageous that Descartes was considered the winner of a public confrontation in which he argued, in 1628, "that only absolute certainty could serve as a basis for knowledge." (p. 93). Most of this book is devoted to consideration of the opposite, "what Stove describes (in the second of his two essays on idealism) as `reasoning from a sudden and violent solecism.' " (p. 134). In the chapter "Who was David Stove?", the contrast between political thought, as it used to be, and our modern world, is considered in the context of, "An unprecedented expansion of Communism took place immediately after the Second World War. For the next twenty-odd years, any possibility of resistance to Communist expansion depended almost entirely upon America: no other country possessed both the requisite military capacity and the willingness to use it." (p. 255). The truth was that both sides were caught in a trap of having to promise more than either power structure was willing to deliver to the people who would have to put up with whatever future was left after all the exploitation. There had been so many promises of peace in Vietnam that by the time the fighting ended, Stove could say, "The nation showed that it had become utterly opposed to any further armed resistance to Communism," (p. 255) and Kimball is absolutely certain this is "All true." Time to check the map: people in many countries managed to change their governments to revolutionary or popular Communist regimes without making a direct attack on the United States of America. Sometimes sneaky, subversive methods can achieve something that direct confrontation could only portray as an opposing stupidity. "American decadence" (p. 256) is identified entirely with a "non-coercive philosophy" espoused by "Robert Nozick's War Wounds" (p. 255) according to "Stove's review of the late Harvard philosopher's book PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS." (p. 255). Things have reached such a low point in the history of the world that this attack on the philosophy of a Harvard professor as evidence of "a massive sedition at home" (as observed by an Australian professor on the bottom of the world) is followed by the observation, "I believe that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men." (p. 257). The connection between these ideas was so obvious to Nietzsche that he considered feminism like democracy and the domestication of cattle, topics which were too modern for philosophical consideration even before people worried about getting mad cow disease because of contaminated animal feed. I would feel more comfortable with a book which does not offend me, in reflecting, "Is there anyone in post-Vietnam America who needs to be placated, whom he has not placated?" (p. 256) on the lack of militancy of a free populace which is what makes any desire in the rest of the world to attack America truly outrageous. Fie on this book and its humor.
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