A real stroll in the philosophical park! Easy reading and well-organized book. Marketed as an introduction to philosophy, I found its style uneven and boring sometimes. I hated specially the broken sentences with the PC tendency of one of the writers of using ‘she/he.’ It dumb pretension of satisfying the feminists in total disregard of its awkwardness. Better to go for the ‘one’ than writing terrible English.
Still I believe the book was worthy reading and I would recommend. It paints with wide strokes the philosophical ideas that we in the West have been considering for thousand of years. The first 2 chapters on ethics and political philosophy as well as the last one are the best. The worst is chapter 3 on metaphysics –you’d better have a lot of coffee for that chapter. An unnecessary chapter is the one on logic: boring as hell!
What will I remember about this book? It definitely woke up the desire of reading Jean Paul Sartre and swimming into Nietzsche’s psychobabbles. Regarding Sartre, the authors say “…we are confronted with our ‘dreadful freedom,” recognizing that we are completely free to choose our world view, our way of living in the world.” True, we might have that feeling but that is not true –if you do not believe me talk to someone that is involved in a religious or political cult or consider an inhabitant of North Korea or a Christian living in Saudi Arabia. They definitely do not have the choice of worldview.
It seems to me that the only freedom that we surely have is the freedom of choosing life. Why should I choose life when I could as well choose death? Why not commit suicide and end a life of uncertainty? That is the question.
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