Book Review: “A Little History of Philosophy”
“A Little History of Philosophy” by Nigel Warburton (2011)
Warburton presents a well-structured, accessible, and often entertaining journey through the history of philosophy from its ancient origins to contemporary leaders.
I was drawn to Warburton’s 300-odd page summary as I try to better understand the “Ph” in “PhD”. I’ve become convinced that any PhD student, even someone doing ‘hard science’ should be aware of the philosophy that underlies knowledge, justification, and methodology. Warburton’s book makes a strong contribution in this vein. He carefully shows, in 40 short and succinct chapters, how the same ideas have diffused across the branches of philosophy. In brief, Warburton describes how ideas on the nature of reality (epistemology) influenced how we undertake and justify science. It this respect, it is essential reading for any broad minded PhD student.
Each of the 40 chapters is centred on one or two philosophers and opens with brief biographical material. The author then summarises those philosophers main ideas and key contributions in 8 or so pages. Of course, this approach means that descriptions and necessarily shallow in each chapter. Warburton attempts to address this by building on the main ideas, such as morality and rationalism, as the book progresses.
The reader comes away from this with a good grounding in philosophy and the origin on the present strands. However, such a style leaves Warburton open to criticism for reinforcing the “great men” view of the history of philosophy. Any book must structure the material therein, Warburton could have chosen to group by topics or broad historical phases. Whilst the personality focus may be a structural limitation to depth, it makes the book highly accessible and readable as a general piece on non-fiction. The approach allows the reader to work through the ideas underpinning philosophy, some of which will fit more with their interests than others, providing a starting point for further reading. As an introductory text in this respect, it is hard to fault.
For my own part, some of the ideas from the book that I found most interesting include:
Stoicism - with it’s ideas of rationality and control over emotions, is something that has always chimed with me, but Warburton overs an even critique of the ideas of the Stoics, offering the summation ”the state of indifference championed by the Stoics may reduce unhappiness in the face of events we can’ control. But the cost might be that we become cold, heartless, and perhaps even less human".
Kant & Armchair Though - In the first of two chapters on Kant, Warburton describes how Kant thought it was possible to create new knowledge (synthetic knowledge) by pure thought alone. “He thought that knowledge that reveals truth about the world, but arrives independently of experience, is possible”. In this view, it is possible to think and reason about the world and produce new knowledge,
Pragmatist Philosophy - Pragmatism is concerned with the practical consequences of thought. In the few of William James, there is no ‘truth’ waiting out there for us, instead ‘truth’ is just what works in a given setting. Warburton uses the example of brittleness - there is no invisible property of brittleness that we can measure, brittleness just means that when I hit some glass it will shatter. The statement “glass is brittle” is true because of these practical consequences.
Russell & Language - Bertrand Russell demonstrated that the language used to structure logical statements matters deeply in philosophy.
A. J. Ayer & Meaningfulness - Ayer argued that unless a statement is either true by definition or empirically verifiable, then it is meaningless. This was an idea developed from Hume and later picked up by Popper. It has a powerful impact on the philosophy of science, showing that science can provide the empirical validation or falsification needed to justify the creation of new knowledge.
Popper & Induction - Whereas deduction is a type of logical argument where if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true, deduction is very different. In induction, a set of observations is used to argue to a general conclusion. This creates the “problem of induction”, as the method can never perfectly predict the future, how can it be relied on. Popper avoids this problem by arguing that science should seek to falsify, rather than verify, hypotheses.