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10 November 201523 August 2023

‘Locke (A Very Short Introduction)’ by John Dunn, Oxford University Press

‘Locke: A Very Short Introduction’ by John Dunn is a short commentary on life, political thought and philosophy of John Locke.

Contents of each chapters are below.
First, in chapter 1, John Dunn introduces the life of Locke briefly with the process of his thought, the scientific situation in Europe and the political affairs in Britain. Three large movement affects thought of Locke. The first movement is he was familiar with Christianity. The second is career of the administration and finance. The third is the commitment to philosophical understanding, which made Locke to consider philosophical question of political authority and toleration, of ethics and the theory of knowledge.
In chapter 2, author comments political thought of Locke. Locke’s central conception of government is the idea of trust. Human beings can deserve each other’s trust, they help to hold together the community. Men are so aware of their need to trust one another and because they sense the aid which this concentrated power to execute the law of nature can offer to their lives.
And, in chapter 3, author summarized Locke’s philosophy of knowledge or epistemology. In the ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’, Locke attempted to show how men can use their minds to know what they need to know and to believe only what they ought to believe. Human beings are free, they must think and judge for themselves. Reason must be their last judge and guide in everything. Moral ideas were inventions of the human mind, not copies of nature. This contrast is the foundation in modern philosophical thinking of the presumption of a stark gap between facts about the world and values for human beings. The distinction between fact and value is both a product of Locke’s conception of human knowing and the subversion of his beliefs about human values.
Then, in ‘conclusion’, author concludes ‘for Locke the central truths about how men have good reason to live are just as independent of what at a particular time they happen consciously to desire’.

I think this book is not a introduction to John Locke and his philosophy, is a intermediate commentary on them. You must have some degree of preliminary knowledge of history, Christianity, political thought, history of philosophy and philosophy of John Locke. Comments of this book is entirely tough and unclear, and devote many pages to write background and surroundings of his philosophy. But this book helps you to develop a deep comprehension to Locke’s philosophy as second or third commentary.
The most valuable fruits I obtained by this book are I can grasp how Locke illustrated his system of epistemology, and understand Locke was a positive, optimistic, practical and religious thinker, he was not a negative, skeptical and Atheist thinker like David Hume.

Locke (Very Short Introductions)
John Dunn
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 31 July 2003
136 pages £7.99 $11.95
ISBN: 978-0192803948
Contents:
Abbreviations
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. Life
2. The Politics of Trust
3. Knowledge, Belief, and Faith
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Index

‘Marx in 90 Minutes’ by Paul Strathern, Ivan R. Dee

‘Marx in 90 Minutes’ by Paul Strathern is a introduction to the thought and man of a German philosopher, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx.

On the main content ‘Marx’s Life and Works’ Strathern describes Marx’s biography along with his thought and philosophy.
Karl Marx was born in Trier, Kingdom of Prussia, and his family is a German Jewish affluent family. The cosmopolitan atmosphere and comfortable bourgeois surroundings were to have significant influences on Marx. And his father Herschel converted to Christianity. This enabled Karl to join German middle class society and European culture (Kant and Voltaire). Marx entered the Bonn University, and a year later Marx transferred to the University of Berlin to continue law studies. In there, Marx encountered philosophy and Hegel’s idealistic vast, all-embracing and ever-evolving system of philosophy. This dynamic system affected all history and all phenomenons. Hegel’s philosophy of history applied government and society. By Hegel, the Prussian state is the ideal liberal society made by a link of the state and citizens. But Hegel’s philosophy was idealism, it insisted that all was moving toward the absolute spirit, was made Marx disappointed but he influenced by Hegel’s dynamism and the dialectical method. Equal to Hegel, another large influence on Marx’s thought was the materialism of a German humanist and moralist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx participated in the Left Hegelians, and he attempted to mix the dialectical theory of consciousness and historical reality by the school with the materialism learned by Feuerbach. After worked at journalist of a liberal newspaper, Marx was exiled from his homeland, move to Paris, Brussels and London, met and formed a friendly relation with a bourgeois Communist Friedrich Engels, and joined the Communist League and wrote the ‘Communist Manifesto’ with Engels. In this era he intensively study Economics of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and form his own materialist epistemology to percept activities in the world. In London, Marx continued to study philosophy of Hegel and Feuerbach, classical economics and collect economic statistics to prepare for his original economic work. By 1859 Marx completed his first economic work ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. In this book, he stated his economic materialism. Social life based is on economic relations. A superstructure of laws and social consciousness reflects the economic structure. Capitalism productions, private property, money and profit motive alienate men from the world and nature. Marx’s massive masterworks, ‘Das Kapital’ published in 1867, which investigates the mechanisms of capitalist economics. Marx viewed history as a succession of class struggles. As capitalism developed, the internal pressures arose, and the revolution by workers collapses the capitalist system. Karl Marx died in 1883. One of Marx’s contributions to philosophy is that it takes place within society, which is run on economic lines.

Strathern comments on forming and content of Marx’s thought along with his life, philosophical background and works. Author particularly explains how Marx formed his philosophy and thought, and the significance of Marx’s thought. The thought realized us what are the value and significance of existence in the modern society. And author also comments Marx didn’t nothing but attack for the capitalism. A socialist society or freedom of workers were fulfilled by reformations of capitalism. And Marx thought the socialist society and the communist society (fulfilled by a revolution) can be formed by adoption of the merits of the advanced capitalist economic and production system.
Also author points out mistakes of Marx. For example, private property and profit motive make us wealthy, and give us freedom in capitalist societies. But socialist societies deprived people of motives for work and innovation, freedom and humanity. And Marx misjudged the role of the capitalist. Capitalists are not wicked men, they are challengers devoted themselves entirely to business, production, innovation and gaining private property by using their own property. The innovation improves technology, science, our working, social and economical conditions. One of the problem of Marxist theory is that he couldn’t foreseen the development of reforms in politics, mass production, technology, science and education driven by the capitalism economics.
Author stands philosophically neutral in judging Marx’s thought. He both criticise and follow thought of Marx. It’s very regrettable majority of people dismissed with prejudice which formed by the dogmatic Marxist theory. I think, for example, concepts of commodity, capital and value-from by Marx are very significance also in today. We should reconsider proper or better capitalist society and capitalist production system by the thought of Marxist philosophy. This book is very helpful to study Marx for quite beginners.
Also you can read this book as an interesting brief biography of Marx. Author describes penniless and wandering life humorously. So I recommend this small book to the reader who what to get a basic understanding of Marx.

Marx in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes Series)
Paul Strathern
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 17 April 2001
96 pages $9.95
ISBN: 978-1-56663-355-0
Contents:
Introduction
Marx’s Life and Works
From Marx’s Writing
Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates
Chronology of Marx’s Life and Times
Recommended Reading
Index

27 October 201523 August 2023

‘Descartes (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Tom Sorell, Oxford University Press

‘Descartes: A Very Short Introduction’ by Tom Sorell is a short introduction to and a commentary on philosophy, thought and life of Descartes for beginners.

Contents of each chapters are below.
1. The fruits of Descartes’s philosophy and thought in many fields, for example physics, mathematics, optics, meteorology, physiology and philosophy especially metaphysics. Descartes bring methods of geometry and physics into metaphysics, and his metaphysics base on austere method by scientific view point and method. The statement ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ is the most enduring and profound intellectual achievement, and is established the modern philosophy continued on Spinoza, Kant and Hegel.
2. Descartes biography of young days. His family background, school days, journey through Europe and coming across with Isaac Beeckman. Meeting with a savant Beeckman realized him his profession is ‘philosophy’ (includes today’s natural philosophy and total science).
3. Descartes’s philosophical method is the unity under mathematics. He planed a master method of scientific discovery by logic, algebra and geometry. And the sciences all dependent on philosophy.
4. Descartes’s consideration to scientific rule by unity and simplicity on ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’. The natural power is ‘simplest’ and ‘absolute’. And he applied common rules or ‘common natures’ to each sciences and human knowledge. And the problem of Descartes is, for example, he applied the matter of physics to human mind mechanically.
5. Descartes’s roaming about in Europe is to discover sure principle in philosophy. The aim of his roaming is to remove his prejudices and to rebuild his new rule of phislophy from logic to medicines and morals. But his investigation is not ideal described on ‘Discourse on the Method’, he struggled to get his method in the roaming.
6. End of his journey, he stayed Paris. And the days, he brushed up and built his theory by debates and arguing with Marin Mersenne and other intellectuals, and prepare for serous work.
7. Moved to Holland, Descartes wrote a book of modern physics ’The World or Treatise on Light’, but he didn’t publish it. The only doctrine of the Church was the scholastics from Aristotle at that time.
8. ‘The Dioptics’ ‘The Meteors’ and ‘the Geometry’ are specimens of Descartes’s method. In these books, Descartes reformed and established mathematical method.
9. ‘Discourse on the Method’ is a scholarly autobiography and a simple notice or announcement of the method that would be found by Descartes. In which Descartes demonstrated ‘new logic’. In contrast with the Aristotelian logic, he tied the incontrovertibility of a piece of reasoning not to relations between the forms of premisses and conclusion.
10. Descartes inspected his idea of supremely benevolent God, his geometrical method and the Method of Doubt are adaptable to his metaphysics.
11. In the Meditation, Descartes found out it would be folly to doubt the existence of material objects and the reality of the simple nature. While material object may not be in reality as they appear to the sense, their mathematical properties are clear, distinct and beyond doubt.
12. Descartes’s scepticism in the Meditation caused widespread dispute. But to criticize sense-based beliefs made us capable of modern physical science, is also called rationalism.
13. The controversy aroused to Descartes’s idea of God by Theologians. Descartes’s God is the metaphysical perfect existence laid the foundation for human perceptions his physics and philosophy, and is not opposed to God of Christianity.
14. Descartes’s concept of idea(s) is only things that exist in the mind and represent other things.
15. According to Cartesian Dualism, the mind is one sort of substance, and body another, because it is possible to from a conception of the mind and a conception of body by way of totally separate sets of clearly and distinctly perceivable attributes.
16. A body persists through change in its sensible form. It’s spatially extended, flexible and changeable.
17. ‘The Principles of Philosophy’ was published, part one of the book is the first summarized the main point of Descartes’s metaphysics and part two, three and four were his physics first opened to the public.
18. Descartes’s the tree of philosophy, the roots of which are metaphysics, the branches of which are medicine, mechanics and morals. Morals to Descartes was the study of the passion, strategies for controlling them, and ways of directing the will towards good and evil.
19. Descartes’s published philosophy and physics caused disputes among scholars and intellectuals, and were prohibited in Universities by Churches. Descartes was invited by Queen Christina of Sweden, to take her lessons. But the Swedish severe winter made him ill and he died on 11 February 1650.
20. The Cartesian theory inherited by Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. Also reaction to the Cartesian epistemology brought about British empiricism by John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. And philosophers nowadays need accept to lay Descartes’s ghost. The criticism would not have endured if philosophers were not still captivated by Descartes’s task.

This book is a introduction to Descartes’s philosophy that is described along with Descartes’s biography and process of founding his philosophy and scientific practise with thought chronologically. And this book comments many topics of Descartes’s life, philosophy, thought and science. He was not only a philosopher of today’s mean, but also a total scientist from metaphysics and logic to moral, through physics, music and medicine. The Cartesian philosophy brought about the continental rationalism and become a root of the idealism. But he was not only a idealist philosopher like Kant or Hegel. (But Kant had been also a total scientist.)
Sorell explains the basis of Descartes’s philosophy mainly relations to methods, theories and forming processes of his physics especially meteorology, astronomy, mechanics and optics, and mathematics especially geometry and algebra. Descartes’s practise and study of physics and mathematics produced his philosophical method especially metaphysics. Author give many pages to consideration on Descartes’s scientific practises, studies, thoughts and methods, and relations them to his philosophy and morals. For example author deal with Descartes’s geometrical method apply to logic, notion of mind and body, and the problem matching of his science and philosophy with the God he thinks. Descartes was the one of founders of the modern philosophy and science. But they gave rise to problem of mind and body, mechanical thinking to nature, environment and mind.

Author takes a balanced approach of agreement and critic to philosophy and methods of Descartes. So this book is helpful to rethink of and critic to (the thought and principle of) the modern philosophy and the modern science. And also you can read it as a kind of history of science. So I recommend it to widespread readers and students includes students of specializing in science, philosophy of science, analytic philosophy and sociology. But in a philosophical view this book is not much technical and detailed on philosophy especially concerning ‘the Meditation’. This book entirely write about background, basis, process and method of philosophy and science by Descartes to read his text. Then it’s a good preparation to read original texts of Descartes.

Descartes (Very Short Introductions)
Tom Sorell
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 12 Oct 2000
128 pages £6.99 $9.95
ISBN: 978-0192854094
Contents:
Texts and Translations
List of illustrations
1. Matter and Metaphysics
2. The Discovery of a Vocation
3. One Science, One Method
4. ‘Abusolutes’, Simple Natures, and Problems
5. Roaming about in the World
6. Paris
7. The Suppressed Physics
8. The Specimens of a Method
9. A New ‘Logic’
10. The Need for Metaphysics
11. The Meditations 12. Doubt without Scepticism
13. The Theologians and the God of Physics
14. Ideas
15. The Mind
16. Body
17. The Physics made Public
18. The ‘Other Science’
19. Last Days
20. Descartes’s Ghost
Further Reading
Index