There’s much good food for thought—and for better thinking—in Critchley’s rambles.
A genial exercise in public philosophy by an admittedly tonsorially challenged practitioner.
To engage in philosophy in public, writes Critchley, is akin to sticking your head out the window and engaging passersby. But, he adds, “If you stick your head out the window, something foul-smelling is likely to land on it.” People are argumentative and contrarian, especially in the digital realm, and they forget a key Socratic tenet of the discipline: The unexamined life isn’t worth living. Happiness is a central issue here, and one of its hallmarks is quiet time for contemplation, easily ruined by the impinging demands of daily life: “The cell phone rings, the email beeps and one is sucked back into the world’s relentless hum and the accompanying anxiety. Not that tucking yourself away from the world is a guarantee for happiness or even decency. As Critchley notes, Rousseau, that most eminent of philosophers, was a deeply unpleasant man, “self-obsessed and totally paranoid,” who stuck all five of his children in an orphanage. Happiness can be a subset of the Greek concept of glory, which boils down to how you’ll be remembered after you’re dead. It can be accomplished by a certain amount of old-fashioned cynicism of the Diogenes variety, which we need more of “in a world like ours, which is slowly trying to rouse itself from the dogmatic slumbers of boundless self-interest, corruption, lazy cronyism and greed.” Ever current, Critchley closes with a meditation on Covid-19 and the anxieties it induces, which he encourages his readers to grapple with rather than self-medicate away. Along his path, he pauses to wonder whether philosophy has progressed at all over the centuries; to appreciate David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, which “he reportedly planned as a message to his fans from beyond the grave”; and to allow, with Pascal, that we’re weak and wretched beings but eminently improvable.
There’s much good food for thought—and for better thinking—in Critchley’s rambles.Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-300-25596-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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