Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating study, lucidly written
Review: Although I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, I have not been able to enjoy the subject for many years because the demands of my law practice simply did not leave me with the time and energy to read and do philosophy. Recently, however, I read this book and once again discovered the pleasure of reading and doing philosophy. Scruton is obviously a master teacher, and he makes even the most complex ideas understandable. His book is lucidly written and fascinating. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Great survery of the contemporary issues and recent history
Review: Don't get me wrong, Scruton is damn good and keeps the book interesting and with a far livelier tone (and higher level of complexity) than you might expect from an attempt at an "introduction" to philosophy. But make no mistake this is not exactly easy stuff (though I'm sure it pales when compared to the whole oeuvre of Analytical gobbledegook from which it was basically spawned).

This book is at it's best (for my interests anyway) when discussing the classic conundrums of modern philosophy i.e. Descartes, Spinoza, Wittgenstein et al. Once the topic moves too far into all this linguistic stuff, my personal peepers start to glaze something awful. The blurb on the front cover claims that philosophy should return itself to broader concerns. I couldn't agree more. I'm just not sure this book does that, entirely . At least not the broader concerns I would imagine most of us have on a day to day basis or even in our wackier, more "speculative" moments. Though to be honest, precisely what a successful version of such would look like is somewhat beyond me. The debate is complex, so why pretend otherwise? And it seems, as this book displays quite well, that even "the fundamentals" are still much in contention. The rest of us, in the meantime, are just trying to get through the day with a semblance of a clue, and are forced to do so whether or not we can prove a "self" or a "world" or what a predicate *really* means in the sentences we use.

Still, there is much to be gained by slogging through the forays into the logic of language (not entirely without interest of course) to find when Scruton actually does come down to street level. It is at that point I believe he is at his most illuminating.

But maybe that's just me.

Rating:
Summary: Very Useful for Intermediate Students
Review: I purchased Scruton's survey as an first-year undergraduate student who was eager to learn just about everything there is to learn about philosophy, and it proved very useful to me throughout my undergraduate career. And it's heartening to flip back through this book and see that I've actually learned a good deal in time I've spent studying philosophy. Before long I may know enough to write a book of this sort myself--not that I have the patience or talent for exposition that would be required to do so.

The aim of this book is to provide a synoptic overview of the concerns and central arguments of philosophy from the seventeenth century to the present. It covers, at least briefly, just about everything that modern philosophers talk about, it displays broad historical erudition, it provides the reader with a sense of how the concerns of contemporary philosophers connect to the history of modern philosophers, and its extensive reading guide gives the reader some helpful suggestions about where to go in the literature for further work on the topics discussed here. It is, moreover, quite good at introducing the basic issues and positions, both of contemporary philosophers and their early modern counterparts, in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. And, although this isn't intended as a work of history, Scruton manages to present most of the major ideas of the most significant figures in modern philosophy (e.g. Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, et al.).

Scruton's subject matter here is broad, to say the least. He discusses just about every subject about which philosophers have had anything to say in the last four hundred years. This book has sections about God, about free will, about morality, about politics, about science, about knowledge and belief, about minds and their relations to bodies, about language and its meaning, about space and time, about mathematics, and about quite a few more things. Indeed, there's simply too much covered here for Scruton to connect all the material and provide much structure to this book. So it's perfectly fine to treat this book as something like a reference work, and to dip into whatever section one finds interesting while ignoring much of the rest of the book. But, for people with little background in philosophy, it would help to begin by reading the fifteen or so chapters straight through. These chapters, which comprise roughly the first third of the book, outline the basic historical and contemporary philosophical ideas that the reader needs to understand most of the rest of the book, and they constitute a pretty good introduction to the material in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind that you need to know to understand the rest of the material here.

Despite Scruton's professed intentions here, however, this text is probably too complex and too compressed for the absolute beginner. Even working with five hundred pages of space, he's forced to cram quite a bit into a short space. Scruton acquits himself well, of course, but it's simply not possible to explain these things as thoroughly as beginners are probably going to need them explained. He tends to cover in twenty pages what most introductory books cover in two hundred. And while this makes his book an invaluable resource of information about philosophy, it also precludes the sort of patient exposition that might be necessary in presenting this material to beginning students of the subject.

I'd recommend this book to people with some background in philosophy who'd like a single-book overview of the subject, and to intermediate students looking for a comprehensive reference work that you can actually read. And if you're unusually ambitious, you might try this as an introduction to philosophy. If you can master everything in this book, you'll almost have the equivalent of an excellent undergraduate education in philosophy. (You'll just need to learn some formal logic, and it wouldn't hurt to learn some additional material in ethics and political philosophy since Scruton's coverage of these areas is somewhat more superficial than his coverage of metaphysics and epistemology.)

Rating:
Summary: The World According to Spock
Review: Modern philosophy, in the narrow sense that Roger Scruton defines it, is not for the faint hearted. Like much of contemporary science, the technical, jargon bound nature of the subject bars all but the most dedicated from tackling its primary sources. Hence the need for books such as this. As far as philosophical primers goes, this is a good one. Scruton wisely breaks his text down into short easily digestible chapters. Eschewing the usual chronological approach he bases each chapter around a particular theme, bringing the ideas of philosophers from different historical periods together in an enlightening fashion. All the big theories are here from Descartes cogito, to Kants transcendental idealism, to Wittgensteins private language argument. Like Bertrand Russell, Scruton has an admirably clear and economical prose style (and an equally dry sense of humour) which enables him to give us non-philosophers some idea of what, for example, Kants Critique of Pure Reason is on about, and why it is such an important book. Modern Philosophy, however, is much more than just a historical compendium of philosophies greatest hits. Scruton spends a good deal of the book dealing with the current theories and controversies that exist within the subject, so that one comes away with a good idea of the state of contemporary philosophy and where it's heading.

On the downside Scruton, a self-professed conservative, displays the usual Right-wing hysteria when it comes to "discussing" the ideas of the Left. Throughout the text he never mentions the Left other than to disparage it. By the end of the book he can no longer contain himself and dedicates an entire chapter to vilifying the whole socialist philosophical tradition. In this bizzare chapter, luridly entitled "The Devil", he lets it all hang out, attacking Marx and Co. with an evangelical fervour that has to be read to be believed. In a nutshell, Scruton maintains that all left-wing philosophy, from Marx to Foucault, is the work of the devil, while (no surprises here) his own conservative values are equated with those of the Almighty himself: the immutable Law that must be obeyed! This Manichaean view of the world is puzzling given that early in the book Scruton claims that one of the main tasks of philosophy is to teach people to resist such vulgar reductionism. Still it's comforting to know that even super intellectuals like Roger Scruton are prey to the same ideological prejudices as the rest of us. The unwillingness of the Right to engage with the Left - both politically and philisophically- in any form of meaningful debate is highlighted by this sort of caricatured nonsense. It is salutary reminder to us, however, that an intimate knowledge of the entire Western philosophical canon does not necessarily lead to an enlightened (i.e. tolerant) political viewpoint. Consider another "Man Who Knew Everything", the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who at one point during the Cold War advocated a first-strike policy against the Soviet Union. Like Russell, Scruton is also a man of logic and reason, defining philosophy exclusively as a discipline which "pays scrupulous attention to arguments, the validity of which it is constantly assessing". Logic and reason are powerful tools no doubt, but as history has all to often demonstrated, they don't always guarantee a logical and reasonable outcome (remember that even Einstein voted for the Bomb). We need other ways of looking at the world. In this context, the writings of both Modernism and Post-Modernism, which Scruton arrogantly dismisses as nonsense, provide a valuable corrective to what John Ralston Saul has termed "The dicatorship of reason in the West". Nevertheless, one ends up admiring the man. Scruton is one of the few thinkers from the Right who says what he means, and means what he says - such intellectual honesty is rare these days. To sum up, "Modern Philosophy" is the best primer on traditional philosophy I have read and, despite the above qualifications, remains an essential read.

Also Recommended:

A Short History of Modern Philosophy by Roger Sruton: less imposing and easier to read than Modern Philosophy.

A few books that Roger Scruton would NOT recommend!

Ideology an Introduction - Terry Eagleton

The Condition of PostModernity - David Harvey

Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond - Douglas Kellner

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Roger Scruton provides an excellent introduction and survey (500 pages plus notes). The best part of the book is that it is organized topically; so, rather than a series of short biographical studies, you get an overview of an issue. For example, there is an excellent discussion of what Frege, Russell, Meinong & Strawson were trying to accomplish.

Scruton is also funny: "[Ayer's] Language, Truth and Logic . . . should be read if possible, provided it is read quickly and innatentively. The details of the argument are preposterous . . . ."

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Roger Scruton provides an excellent introduction and survey (500 pages plus notes). The best part of the book is that it is organized topically; so, rather than a series of short biographical studies, you get an overview of an issue. For example, there is an excellent discussion of what Frege, Russell, Meinong & Strawson were trying to accomplish.

Scruton is also funny: "[Ayer's] Language, Truth and Logic . . . should be read if possible, provided it is read quickly and innatentively. The details of the argument are preposterous . . . ."

Rating:
Summary: A fantastic introduction for those wishing to learn
Review: There is too much to recommend Scruton to the beginner, so I won't attempt to summarize them. I will say that this book is the best survey I've ever read.

The complaints of complexity are legion in philosophy- it's not a subject for the average man by its very nature. Scruton does as well as any man living or dead in making philosophy understandable to the novice. The reviewers below simply do not understand that this comes with the territory by definition: philosophy is exegesis at the limits of the human grasp. I previously thought there was no way to make it as accessible as this without sacrifising too much: Scruton proved me wrong. You get farther with less hard work under Scruton than any philosopher since Nietzsche. And I know of no one who can make Kant instantly intelligable.

I disagree with Scruton a good amount of the time, and it makes not one iota of difference: this is a little masterpiece. Even the scattered criticism is wrong. Scruton has taken on left philosophers head on more than once (he has a book on the subject). For the most part, he does an excellent job with the quick hack and slash job he does here. The line about anyone asking you to believe that nothing is true is asking you not to believe them is a little rhetorical gem. I don't think it's hard to dismiss the Sausser and Derrida clique outright and then get on to the job of doing philosophy. Maybe that is my fault for not being smart enough- I don't think being able to spot the inconsistancy of an argument from the first sentence means that I have to continue debating the issue.

Either way, the hardest and most worthwhile philsophers extant get the long shrift here, which is precisely how any book purporting to be a survey should work. This book is for everyone: for the beginner looking to uderstand and for the veteran who likes clear and cogent argument. Buy this book.