I’m so glad Palmer took the initiative of writing Looking at Philosophy.
The journey of philosophy has really been the journey of mankind. Philosophy implores us to question the basic assumptions we have, and thereby attempt to better understand the world we live in.
In the over two and a half thousand years that have passed since the first steps taken by Thales of Miletus, who is generally considered, as Palmer notes, the first true philosopher, we have come a long, long way.
Generations of philosophers have come, expressed their ideas and gone. Their ideas have both educated and challenged the philosophers that followed them, who took upon the task of improving or replacing those ideas with something that made more sense, thus shaping the discourse of philosophy, and this meandering journey has affected the thoughts of the contemporary people in profound ways.
So why is this book so important?
If you were to pick up the original works of any philosopher, there are good chances you won’t be able to understand many of the ideas, much less all of them, on the first reading. A very notable exception is Plato, some of whose early dialogues are actually the teachings of Socrates.
There is a reason for this. Since these works take upon the task of unravelling our conception of the world, including questioning our assumptions, it takes some preliminary effort to wrest the reader free from his mental mould. Philosophers, influential philosophers in any case, are rigorous in how they approach their written material, precisely because they know this difficulty inherent in the task lying ahead.
Add to this another peculiarity – you take up any philosopher in history and chances are you’ll be able to summarise his ideas in a few simple paragraphs that everyone will be able to at least comprehend (again there could be a few exceptions – Husserl and his phenomenology being a good candidate, for example), even if not fully understand. By that I mean you will be able to understand the “what” of his philosophy, even if you may not understand the “why” and the “how”.
The result is truly interesting. On the one hand, you have the philosophers trying to explain to you very foundational things, yet, on the other hand, those very philosophers have to take such an academic route to explain it, in order to break through the notions we have built since our birth, that it becomes difficult to understand their ideas.
And here is where Palmer enters the scene. He explains the “why” and “how” of the ideas that make original works so difficult to read. And he does this beautifully.
Palmer wonderfully condenses the ideas of the philosophers he takes up and presents them in a really engaging manner. In addition, his sense of humour and the keen sense of balancing this humour with the difficulty of some of the ideas presented, really pushes up the quality of the material by several notches.
Palmer does not at any point try to oversimplify or trivialise the ideas for the sake of the reader – no, where is the fun in that! The fun is in realising the essential soul of the ideas, putting them into a historical context, and then linking that context with the inevitability of its own rise.
Serious, scholarly philosophy is not suited to all kinds of people. It requires a certain level of patience, intellect and flexibility. Nevertheless, the lack of such traits should not act as hindrances for the dissemination of such important ideas as have shaped the very course of the human race.
This book is marvellous. It tells you the history of philosophy in all its beauty, in a completely unconventional manner. This is the perfect book for those who want to have a taste of serious philosophy, yet are driven away by the (expected) standards of rigor found in original works.