Get a Grip on Philosophy

I am an Undergraduate Senior in Philosophy. I picked up this book in the bargain section after several years of reading selections from most of the philosophers listed. (Exceptions of James, Wittingstein, Adorno, and Kierkegaard.) This was a great tool for connecting all the bits I'd picked up and never could quite connect. It reads like a comic book...but don't let that fool you. For those of you new to philosophy, who doesn't have an axe to grind? Religion has always been both and enemy and an influence to Philosophy, and Turnbull reflects this in his own angstful way. Overall, this is a good read, singlar in the fact that it pulls so many diverse concepts into one easy-to-read book. I've been thinking of passing it on it to my girlfriend as part of a (guided) introduction to my world.

There is a lot that Turnbull says that I don't agree with, but he does a very good job of explaining his point of view. His is a biased but still very useful summary of the history of philosophical ideas. A beginner should find it useful because of it's brevity and clear explanation of some difficult concepts. But a beginner should never rely on this book alone because Turnbull has a a very specific point of view that he makes very clear. He despises analytical philosophy and Wittgenstein (as do I, for reasons that would take at least a chapter of a book). He also interestingly divides modern philosophers (that is, starting with Descartes) into "technocrats" and "philistines" (the pragmatists). Kant and Hegel for instance would be technocrats with differing degrees of romanticism. Of course there is a world of difference between Kant and Hegel as everyone knows, but it's instructive to listen to Turnbull enumerate the similarities.And therein lies the attraction of this book for someone like me who Turnbull would probably recognise as having technocratic leanings (Kant's my philosophical hero). He clearly enjoys the arguments even of people he does not agree with. Though I daresay he also trivializes or distorts the arguments of some of the philosophers he mentions. Plus he shows really bad taste in saying Heidegger was one the few true philosophers of the 20th century, though he gives cogent reasons for saying that. But still it rankles me that he doesn't acknowledge Heidegger's procedural debt to Husserl.Most importantly though, he tackles many of the 20th century philosophers, whose names we often hear but whose views are often presented as an indigestible melange. Even if his summaries seem idiosyncratic, they are far more useful than the outright worship or denigration one or the other side of certain philosophical debates seems to heap on the modern philosophers (analytical philosophers are not philosophers, so it is ok to hate them without fear of error). So I really found his summaries of Derrida, Foucault, Adorno, Marcuse and even Heidegger interesting enough to make we want to find arguments from other sources to either support or disprove his analyses of these thinkers.His main interest really is ethical philosophy, which explains his disagreements with the "technocrats" and his clear dislike of the "philistines" (even if his choice of name here wasn't already indicative of what he thinks of them). Maybe this is why one reviewer complained that the book was mainly just religious opinion. It is of course one of our modern diseases that we cannot divorce ethics from religion (Nietzche's perhaps ill-considered attempt having driven him mad), but this book is certainly not religious unless you consider Turnbull's meanderings about the "goddess of philosophy" to be religion.So read the book if you are philosophically inclined. It has its own rewards.

This book gives a very comprehensive overview for many different philosophical concepts and ideas. It's an easy, quick read for those who are interested in philosophy. Minus one star because the philosophical vocabulary is cumulative and by the third chapter it becomes hard to distinguish between the different concepts.

This introduction to philosophy is most valuable for its Introduction and its final chapter. The Introduction identifies two enemies of philosophy as she was and perhaps can be again. One enemy is the technocrats, led by the arch-technocrats Plato and Aristotle, who turned philosophy away from the pure speculative wonder of the presocratics and made her the handmaiden of organised religion and then of science. The second enemy is the philistines, who pragmatically subvert philosophy in the interest of big business and its unthinking consumers. The final chapter describes the wretched condition of current philosophy, which has no contact with the concerns of the ordinary person in the street and is rapidly disappearing up its own analytic fundament. The prescribed cure is a return to speculative, imaginative, wonder-inspired, and relevant philosophising. In between these sections we get an interesting potted history, including postmodernism. Turnbull exaggerates the extent to which current philosophy fails to connect with ordinary concerns, and he fails to exemplify the sort of philosophy he wants to see, but his book, refreshingly for such a work, has definite 'attitude'.

A delightful book. A very concise review of Western philosophy from its roots in pre-Socratic Greece up to the present, with suggestions for the future. The illustrations were somewhat over-the-top, but maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy. Provided a framework to unite my freshman Introduction to Greek Philosphy (long, long ago) with other disconnected bits accumulated over the years.