All our books
- Arts, crafts & photography
- Audio books
- Biography
- Business & finance
- Children's books
- Environment & nature
- Fiction & poetry
- Food & drink
- Guardian and Observer published books
- Health & wellness
- History books
- Home & garden
- Humour
- Music, stage & screen
- Politics
- Popular psychology
- Puzzle books
- Reference
- Science & technology
- Society & culture
- Sports & hobbies
- Travel books
Our newsletters
Sign up to our newsletters and be the first to hear about new books and special offers! Find out more.
Enter our competitions
Enter one of our competitions and you could walk away with a fantastic prize! Find out more.
About us
The Guardian Bookshop makes over 180,000 books available with up to 40% discount, as well as highlighting some of our favourite publications in each genre.
Find out more.
Little History of Philosophy
By Nigel Warburton
Hardback (other formats)
RRP £14.99
Our price: £14.99
In stock, usually despatched within 24 hours.
Trade review
Synopsis
Book Details
| Publisher: |
|---|
| YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS |
| Publication Date: |
| 19-Aug-2011 |
| ISBN: |
| 9780300152081 |
Guardian review
the guardian Fri 11 November 2011
A Little History of Philosophy, by Nigel Warburton (Yale, £14.99)
Survey the entire history of (western) philosophy through short intellectual biographies of 40 philosophers from Socrates to Peter Singer, in as broadly approachable a style as EH Gombrich's A Little History of the World. A tall order; that Warburton (of the excellent podcast Philosophy Bites) has succeeded so well is a triumph of conceptual microengineering. The tone is friendly and amusing, though sometimes, probably inevitably, necessary simplification gives way to over-simplification. It's really not "the main message" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus that one should take good opportunities to shut up (as Nicolas Sarkozy might paraphrase him) about ethics; and it is a shame that the article on David Hume concentrates on his criticism of design arguments for God, which risks portraying Hume dubiously as some sort of new-atheist flag-waver for the reliability of science.
A lot of the art (and submerged polemic) here lies in the selection of subjects: it's nice to have Pyrrho, Kierkegaard and Ayer, more surprising to have Darwin and Freud, especially if there is then to be no room for (say) Frege. People who enjoy spelling "Being" with a capital B might also be annoyed by the inclusion of Hannah Arendt (banally on the "banality of evil"), while famous boyfriend Heidegger is dispatched in a sentence. But so goes the speeding trolley-car of philosophical fashion.
Towards a New Manifesto, by Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Verso, £9.99)
What is this, Bash Heidegger Week? The man gets short shrift here as well ("pure irrationalism"). Caught in conversation in 1956, the philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer (not in Warburton's book) come over as a rarefied Bill and Ted, playing a dialectical tennis match. One replies to a heavy forehand with an ironic little dropshot, both collaborate in some artful long rallies of conceptual complication, and occasionally a wild attempted winner hits a line-judge in the groin.
Much of their interesting conversation about work, happiness, leisure, and society is rather germane to our time of "Occupy" and unemployment. (Adorno: "Basically, we should talk to mankind once again as in the 18th century: you are upholding a system that threatens to destroy you.") Oddly, Horkheimer also has a thing about motorbikes, despising folk who enjoy riding them but harbouring a deep erotic fascination himself: the "true pleasure in motorbike riding," he declares, "is in the anal sounds it emits." Interesting if true.
The Things that Nobody Knows: 501 Mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything, by William Hartston (Atlantic, £16.99)
"Why is everyone so down on Heidegger?" is not one of the unanswered questions considered here, but David Hume's views on causation do make an appearance, as do the following conundrums: why is gravity so much weaker than the other physical forces? What does the enciphered Voynich Manuscript say? How did Ambrose Bierce die? What colours were dinosaurs? No one knows, yet.
This nicely browsable compendium is published under the depressing rubric of "Gift" books, but it is properly researched, and the elegance of its pop-cosmology or pop-biology mini-narratives rivals that of many specialists. It is slyly witty (a knowingly arbitrary taxonomy: "Coffee", "Popes", "Reality"), and pleasingly optimistic. As Hartston explains: "Rumsfeld's known unknowns are what determines the direction of future research and that is what makes ignorance so exciting." Why are male cats more likely to be left-pawed and female cats to be right-pawed? It is enormously reassuring to know that somewhere a natural philosopher is trying to find out.
Observer review
the observer Thu 01 September 2011
The idea that braininess is sexy may provide comfort to philosophers, but their own subject refutes the delusion. It boasts more than its fair share of grey cells, but where is its Brian Cox or Bettany Hughes, enthusing in front of swooping, helicopter-mounted cameras on primetime TV? Science has all the good pictures, history the best stories and all philosophy is left with is books, blokes and the odd pile of bricks.
Perhaps the problem is that publishers and producers don't know how to make the best of philosophy's most prized asset: ideas. For in the right hands, aren't ideas the most interesting, if not the sexiest, things of all? It's something of a travesty that in the desire to make philosophy more palatable, too many people want to sugar the pill so much that all the flavour and nutrition is lost in whatever gimmicky sweet coating has been applied.
Nigel Warburton understands this more than most and while he lacks the media profile of Alain de Botton, over the years he has quietly become quite one of the most-read popular philosophers of our time. Over nearly two decades his Philosophy: The Basics has sold in excess of 100,000 copies, with no gimmicks, no literary flourishes, just admirable clarity, concision and accuracy. These might sound like unexciting trademarks, but philosophy is like fish: best presented without too much adornment; hard to get just right and easy to ruin.
More recently, Warburton has taken this no-nonsense approach into new media with his philosophy bites podcast series, made with David Edmonds. It's a very simple format: each episode of around 15 minutes is a short interview with a philosopher. The series has had more than 11 million downloads to date and Warburton's related Twitter feed was recently ranked by PeerIndex as more influential than those of Evan Davis, Katie Price and Kevin Pietersen.
Warburton's latest is one of those books for children that adults will probably read more. It's modelled on EH Gombrich's 1935 A Little History of the World, which was published in English for the first time only six years ago by the same publisher. Both contain 40 short chapters arranged in more or less chronological order. Warburton runs from Socrates to Peter Singer, with most philosophers getting a chapter to themselves, a few sharing the berth and Kant getting the solitary accolade of two to himself.
Some will no doubt find the selection reflects parochial tastes a little too much. For instance, the British utilitarians Mill and Bentham get a chapter each but there is no room for the German phenomenology of either Heidegger or Husserl. Oxford logical positivist AJ Ayer also makes the cut, even though the star is waning of this importer of ideas that were developed in more durable depth by German and Austrian thinkers in the Vienna Circle, such as Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. Nevertheless, such rows about who's in and who's out are inevitable and what matters most is that Warburton includes all the figures whose place in the canon is secure.
The format is brazenly formulaic. Every chapter opens by setting up the key philosophical question before moving on to give a little biographical or historical background, usually in the second or third paragraph. Each chapter ends by making a link, however tenuous, to the next thinker, by means of contrast ("Scientists use real experiments; philosophers, on the other hand, tend to use thought experiments") or similarity ("The political philosopher John Rawls also used a thought experiment").
It's all refreshingly straightforward and old-fashioned, a kind of philosophical Jackanory: Immanuel Kant as read by Brian Cant. It works for the same reason that Warburton's books and podcasts always work: philosophy is tremendously interesting but it is a difficult subject often needlessly made even more so by the way in which it is written. It would be wrong to say Warburton makes it look easy, but he does make making it clear look easy, which clearly it is not.
I have no idea whether the youth of today will go for his avuncular approach, but I suspect it's irrelevant. Even given Warburton's gifts, I'm sure that only the brightest children will be capable of the complex thinking the ideas stimulate. But with its complete absence of condescension, the book is bound to find a readership among older teenagers and adults who still don't have that many options open to them if they want a readable and wide-ranging introduction to philosophy.
Warburton packs a heck of a lot in to what is something of a Goldilocks volume: neither too much nor too little, the exegesis neither too thin or too thick and lumpy, his Little History can be consumed as a nourishing treat in its own right or provide the perfect fuel to kick-start anyone's journey into philosophy.
Julian Baggini's latest book is The Ego Trick: What Does it Mean to be You? (Granta)
Look inside
You may also like
Nicholas Joll
RRP: £12.99
Offer Price: £10.39
You save: £2.60






