Category: Text

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

‘Descartes in 90 Minutes’ by Paul Strathern is an very very short introduction to Descartes. This book is a very easy, short, brief and amusing guide book to Descartes. The main content ‘Descartes’s Life & Works’ is a biographical description of Descartes’s life along with works and thoughts. It includes Descartes’s divided characteristics of ‘solitude and travel’, his personal and philosophical inclination, health weakness and refined fashion. And Strathern explains philosophical background of the era (influences of Scholasticism, Catholicism and Renaissance). Then he writes how Descartes changed and advanced the philosophical and scientific view in the Europe. ‘Afterword’ describes influences of, criticism to, failure of Descartes’s philosophy, especially his dichotomy of mind and matter, and mechanical view of universe. Even today, his argument and thinking are important and controversial in philosophy and science.

This book is an excellent interesting digest of Descartes’s total biography, but disappointingly philosophical commentary is few. But there are some right to point commentaries to Descartes’s philosophy. I’ll quote one of them. Descartes ‘had conceived of a universal science capable of embracing all human knowledge. This would arrive at truth by the use of reason. But this was much more than just a revolutionary new method. — Descartes had conceived of a system that would not only include all knowledge but also unite it. This system would be based on certainly alone. It would start from basic principles, which were themselves self-evident, and would build from there.’

Descartes in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes Series)
Paul Strathern
Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, September 1 1996
91 pages $7.95
ISBN: 978-1-56663-129-7
Contents:
Introduction
Descartes’s Life and Works
Afterword
From Descartes’s Writing
Chronology of Significant Philosophical Dates
Chronology of Descartes’s Life
Chronology of Descartes’s Era
Recommended Reading
Index

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‘The Meaning of Life (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Terry Eagleton, Oxford University Press

‘The Meaning of Life’ by Terry Eagleton is a philosophical and humorous inquiry for the meaning of human life.
Chapter 1 ‘Question and Answers’ explains why we have a question for our life and the meaning of life, and what is the structure of the question and human existence, introducing historically how philosophers and religions think about them and answer, why TV evangelists and sports attract people.
Chapter 2 ‘The Problem of Meaning’ describes theological and abstract arguments about ‘meaning(s)’. And the Eagleton considers what is meaning(s) and why we ask and want to know meaning of life.
Chapter 3 ‘The Eclipse of Meaning’ wrote spreading philosophical and scientific questions about meaning of life to the people and decline of religious meaning and value supported by God in modern ages. ’inherent’ and ‘ascribed’
Chapter 4 ‘Is Life What You Make It?’ introduces Aristotle’s view of happiness and pleasure, Nietzsche’s concepts of power and will, Marx’s materialism and ‘self-realisation’, and Freud’s desire and Thanatos. Then Eagleton states his one conclusion of the meaning of life. It’s fulfilment of one another or social fulfilment. ‘The fulfilment of each becomes the ground for the fulfilment of the other. When we realize our natures in this way, we are at our best. This is partly because to fulfil oneself in ways which allow others to do so as well rules out murder, exploitation, torture, selfishness, and the like.’
Then Eagleton give a case of a jazz band as an example of good life. ‘There is no conflict here between freedom and the ‘good of the whole’.’ ‘Though each performer contributes to ‘the greater good of the whole’.’

This book is humorous tricky book and essential descriptions are few. It’s just only an introduction to obtain the meaning of life.

The Meaning of Life (A Very Short Introduction)
Terry Eagleton
Oxford University Press, Oxford, June 30 2007
pages £7.99 $11.95
ISBN: 978-0-19-953217-9
Contents:
List of illustrations
Preface
1. Questions and Answers
2. The Problem of Meaning
3. The Eclipse of Meaning
4. Is Life What You Make It?
Further Reading
Index

Related Posts and Pages

‘Philosophy (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Edward Craig, Oxford University Press

‘Ancient Philosophy (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Julia Annas, Oxford University Press

‘Continental Philosophy (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Simon Critchley, Oxford University Press

‘Plato (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Julia Annas, Oxford University Press

‘Aristotle (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Jonathan Barnes, Oxford University Press

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

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

‘Marx (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Peter Singer, Oxford University Press

‘Barthes (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Jonathan Culler

‘Love (A Very Short Introduction)’ by Ronald de Sousa, Oxford University Press

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‘On Pierce (Wadsworth Philosophy Series)’ by Cornelis de Waal, Wadsworth Cengage Learning

‘On Pierce’ by Cornelis de Waal is a very short most plain introduction to philosophy and thought of Charles Sanders Pierce. This book explains from basic structure and definitions of Pierce’s philosophy and science, through his thinking about pragmatism, evolution and religion, to his semiotics and semiotic thought of man. The commentaries includes influences and differences of Pierce’s philosophy with Aristotle, Duns Scotus, British empiricism (John Locke, David Hume and George Barkley), Immanuel Kant, American pragmatism (William James and John Dewey) and Ferdinand de Saussure. More than half of description of this book is an explanation of basis, method and systems of Pierce’s entire philosophy and total science. Last two chapters are a commentary of Pierce’s semiotics and its view, are concise and very clear.

I want to quote description of chapter 10 in this book below, it’s great summary of Pierce’s philosophy and semiotic thought. ‘As we saw with his evolutional cosmology, for Pierce the whole universe is evolving mind; more specifically, the universe consists of mind that is increasingly bound by habit. Hence, the self too is mind bound by habit, just as everything else is. What distinguishes the self from material objects, including the human body, are the specific habits by which it is bound and the degree into which it has retained spontaneity. Recall that within Pierce’s evolutionary cosmology everything emerged out of a state of pure spontaneity through a process of habit formation.’

On Pierce (Wadsworth Philosophy Series)
Cornelis de Waal
Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Belmont, December 22 2000
96 pages $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-534-58376-7
Contents:
Preface
1. Who’s Charles Pierce
2. A New List of Categories
3. Phenomenology and the Normative Science
4. Pragmatism
5. The Scientific Method
6. Scientific Metaphysics
7. Evolutionary Cosmology
8. Philosophy of Religion
9. Semeiotic
10. A Semeiotic Theory of Man
Suggestions for Further Reading
Notes