The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions: A Philosophical Adventure with the World's Greatest Thinkers

The book is in three parts: "Who Am I?", "What Do I Know?" and "What Should I Do?" These parts correspond to philosophical conundrums about consciousness, epistemology and morality, respectively. Fearn's method is to interview contemporary philosophers on these subjects and to compare and contrast their views while referring to the views of philosophers of the past. In the first part Fearn tackles the problem of the self, free will, artificial intelligence, and the dualism of body and soul. The modern consensus, as I understand it, is that the self (as the Buddha taught) is a delusion in flux that the evolutionary mechanism has found useful for instilling in creatures such as ourselves; that free will is an illusion we can't help but believe; that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence (but that may take longer than previously thought); and that the soul is pure information. For the most part Fearn's presentation of views and his comments are more or less in line with my understanding. "Does the idea never thought exist?" would be my variant on Bishop Berkeley's old query about the tree in the forest. My answer goes to the heart of the next part of Fearn's book which concerns what we know, how we know it, and how much confidence in that knowledge we can have. I lie awake nights wondering where the idea never thought is. It's not on the ether wind and not in God's mind. WHERE is it? I refuse to believe that it doesn't exist. Or is all of human knowledge merely a gigantic social construction (as the postmodernists would have it) forever distant from true knowledge? Clearly Fearn is not a postmodernist since he mostly diminishes this idea. Most philosophers and other thinkers that I have read, believe that human knowledge is an ever-widening sphere going out into a larger unknown. We learn more and more about ourselves and the universe we live in, but we have no way of knowing how distant or close to Absolute Truth we might be, or could possibly be. Furthermore, we cannot know with certainty that we know anything at all. Descartes might have thought he found something true in "Ego cognito sum," but actually he assumed the "I am" in the "I think" and proved nothing. And nobody, if I am reading Fearn rightly, has gotten any further than that. In the final part there are some bits about "moral luck," e.g., Johnny got drunk, drove like an idiot but hit only an old tree stump and walked away with only a scratch, while Frankie, also under the influence, hit a child and killed it. Morally speaking Frankie is feeling kind of low while Johnny hasn't a clue. This is moral luck. All in all this is a most interesting book, but to be honest, I think Fearn is a little short of a mature understanding of some of the questions. In particular I don't think he realizes that the subjectivity of the experience of color or taste or any sort of feeling is absolute. I can never know exactly how you experience the color red or th

Through the centuries, great minds such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Locke, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, have sought the Holy Grail of wisdom. In their own ways, they sought to divine the nature of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. In our postmodern age, however, a time of relativism, skepticism and "suspicion," the Holy Grail seems ever more elusive. Nietzsche said that the closer one gets to a subject, the more problematical it becomes. Indeed, it is no longer apparent, as it seemed to be to thinkers of an earlier time, what exactly constitutes Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. Nicholas Fearn, a philosophy graduate from King's College, London, and the author of Zeno and the Tortoise: How to Think Like a Philosopher (2002), seeks to shed light on perennial philosophical puzzles by asking: What do living philosophers have to say about life's greatest mysteries? The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote, "All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in following three questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do? (3) What may I hope?" The threefold division of The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions are similar to Kant's concerns: Who am I? What do I know? and What should I do? In Part One, Fearn discusses the problem of the self, free will vs. fate, minds and machines, human consciousness and artificial intelligence, and bodies and souls. In Part Two, he tackles the problems of knowledge and meaning, innate ideas, the language of thought, postmodernism and pragmatism, and the limits of understanding. In Part Three, he deals with moral luck, the expanding circle (animal rights and vegetarianism), and the meaning of life and death. If Fearn's book actually provided answers to such problems it would be a marvel. The "answers" in this book, however, are more in the nature of various and conflicting theories held by contemporary thinkers who disagree, and whose arguments and debates remain unsettled. Calling his project "an audit of Western philosophy," Fearn consulted more than thirty of the world's most distinguished thinkers, among them John Searle, Bernard Williams, Daniel Dennett, Martha Nussbaum, and Peter Singer, for their insights on the human condition. According to Fearn, his book "assesses the current state of the philosophical art, taking a wide view of what has been achieved in recent years in the most hotly contested areas, and examines the latest approaches to problems that were first tackled in the ancient world." The British philosopher Bertrand Russell observed, "To learn how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do." Reading Fearn's current philosophical venture does little to relieve uncertainty. The title of his book is overly optimistic, promising more than it delivers. A better title would be The Latest Speculations, or Opinions, Concernin

Fearn joins the ranks of writers attempting to bridge "Established" notions of what constitutes "Western" thought and the new views challenging tradition. Although he's not the first to attempt this synthesis, his organisation and style place him among the leaders of such effort. With gentle precision, Fearn places the advocates in carefully constructed arenas. The book's three sections, "Who am I?", "What do I know?" and "What should I do?" provide the framework for his presentation. Within these arenas, the author introduces the reader to various thinkers through summations of their views. He adds a nice personal touch where he can in relating attributes gleaned through personal interviews. He must be very charming [or bears a charmed life], since he manages personal conversations with many major figures in philosophy. Not all of them are amenable to the "journalistic" approach. Given the potentially hazardous mix of considered thought and off-hand expression, this book comes off admirably. After some introductory material on how earlier thinkers viewed the "self", Fearn tries to show how views have changed - and why. He has no qualms about "hard questions", since he opens with the debate over how the human mind and computers can be compared. Jerry Fodor's "computational theory of mind" is given a good airing, but, as usual, the model is a bit overdrawn. Equating the mind too closely with a machine has led to questions ranging from brain "transplants" to the plausibility of "Star Trek's" transporter. Fearn, in his contact with Daniel Dennett, might have been set straight on this point, but he seems to have failed to ask the proper questions. Fearn fares better in the second section, "What do I know?" The inevitable opening, "Is life merely an illusion" doesn't keep him long. He quickly moves to assessing "reality" through reasoning and common sense. More to the point, he recognises that knowledge of our evolution outweighs conjecture about mystical forces impinging on our consciousness. His dismissal of Alvin Plantinga's bizarre notions is nearly as entertaining as Michael Ruse's in "Darwin or Design", although not as knowledgeable. Once we accept there are things to be known, we ascribe "meaning" to them. How do we distinguish what is innate from what we derive during life? Can the distinction actually be made? Again, Fearn mixes ancient and modern views in attempting a synthesis. He ranges from Descartes and Kant to Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge. The dichotomy of meaning being located within the mind or somewhere "outside" takes up much of the section. "Externalism", Fearn contends, shows that philosophical problems "are more than just disputes over words or arbitary definitions". Science can provide the definitions which takes them beyond just an individual's concept of what they are. Yet langauage, that supposedly uniquely human facility, keeps definitions at the edge of perceiving clearly what we know.

Please check the review at "The Economist" dated Dec 17,2005 " ... a commendable book"