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)
