Grayling also draws attention to the different motives that lie behind reasoning. Indeed, the book demonstrates how philosophical ideas rarely have a single creator hypotheses bounce back and forth between protagonists and across generations. And while he may not have pinched it from there, Descartes “almost certainly learnt” of Augustine’s idea – “fallor ergo sum” (If I am deceived, I exist) – as a schoolboy with the Jesuits. The book demonstrates how philosophical ideas rarely have a single creatorĮngaging in a wonderful line of historical speculation, Grayling notes that Descartes’ famous “cogito, ergo sum” (I think therefore I am) had been articulated in a more long-winded fashion by the Frenchman’s contemporary Jean de Silhon at least five years earlier. Most of Aristotle’s dialogues were lost and the rest of his work sat in a cellar for decades “where they were attacked by damp, mould, insects and mice” until eventually recovered. Who knew Plato required knowledge of mathematics for entry to his academy? Or that John Locke introduced “consciousness” into English? Or that John Rawls was politicised by his feminist mother?įamiliar texts throw up fresh insights in Grayling’s hands, and he skilfully highlights the role chance plays in the history of ideas. He is a superb communicator of complex concepts with an eye for the arresting fact. The 70-year-old academic, who scandalised his peers by setting up an independent undergraduate college in London a few years ago, has a masterly appreciation of the currents of western philosophical thought, especially the Anglo-American tradition.
AC Grayling appears well qualified under all three headings. Trying to outdo Russell, then, requires not just considerable brainpower and a way with words but also a bit of an ego. The book is rarely read from cover to cover and it’s full of head-spinning digressions but Russell won a Nobel Prize in Literature partly on the strength of it, and it remains de rigueur on the shelves of any respectable intellectual. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy looms over his academic successors in the same way James Joyce’s Ulysses overshadows novelists.
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