Delving into a bit of philosophy
I received my two books on order today. Both from the Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, A C Grayling: Against all Gods; Six Polemics on Religion and an essay on kindness, and What is Good?; The Search for the best way to live.
Against all Gods is a rather short book at around 60 pages. You can probably fit all he has to say in a 2 hour lecture or so. I have only read about 20 pages, and so far it has been good, although I expected a bit more in terms of the use of the English language. It has been very easy reading up to now, but I have grown fond of the articulatory barbed writers such as Paine, Pinker and Dawkins. Then again, its way to short to judge the book on only the first 20 odd pages. I will revisit this in a later post when I have finished with both books.
Other than that I have been busy with beefing up my portfolio with some example work. I will post these later after I have submitted them to the potential employer, they include a logo, a full vehicle vinyl wrap, a large roll up poster and a website cover.
I really enjoyed both those books — What Is Good? is particularly informative and enjoyable. The sort of follow-up to it, The Choice of Hercules, is a nice modern addendum to the case put forward in WIG? But I love all AC Grayling’s stuff, to be honest. The “…of Things” series is also superb!
Hi Louis! I am about a 3rd of the way into What is Good?
I did not enjoy Against all God’s as much as I hoped I would. It feels extremely rushed and the arguments presented feels a bit crude. That said What is Good? so far has been excellent. The writing style is easy to follow(but not dumbed down) and well presented.
To be fair I have read these books in the incorrect order, Grayling mentions in Against all Gods that people also should take What is Good as a baseline, or something in those terms, which I haven’t done.
This is my first attempt at getting into philosophy and its been fun so far.
Against All Gods was really a short (very short) summary of a few of his other books, plus a short essay or two that was published in magazines / newspapers. In the preface, he did warn that the book(let) is ‘brief and blunt’ and pointed to his proper book-length treatments of the issues concerned.
Another superb modern philosopher whose work I’d recomment to anyone is Daniel Dennett. Have you read any of his stuff?
By the way, I live in JHB. Whereabouts are you?
*excuse spelling and grammar, please. I just woke up. lol
I have not read Dennett’s work yet. I did attend a lecture which he gave on our campus, somewhere at the start of the year. I have been thinking to get Consciousness Explained for some time now, which book will you recommend to read first from him?
I am currently living in Stellenbosch, working part time for the University at the faculties of Sport Science and Theology(don’t tell anyone). I have received work in Upington last week so I may still move there before the end of the week… so I have some big decisions to make today.