About 166 pages into the book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow*. Not sure, really, what I think of it. Conflicted, basi­cally. It’s a rather gos­sipy book, when I was hop­ing for more phi­los­o­phy, as its sub­jects, Rousseau and Hume, would lend them­selves to a very inter­est­ing com­par­i­son. It does some of that, show­ing Rousseau’s famous ele­va­tion of the state of nature and the ben­e­fits to humans in a that state, ver­sus Hume’s far more skep­ti­cal, “real­is­tic” vision. They also talk about his empiri­cism in such a way that I could see Nietzsche’s per­spec­tivism aris­ing from it, and then Husserl’s phe­nom­e­nol­ogy. Had not seen the con­nec­tions before, when I read Hume decades ago.

So far, how­ever, the sec­tions on actual ideas and the life of the mind are too few and far between.
The book is well-​​written and inter­est­ing in parts, but I’m not sure if I want my philoso­phers knocked down to such human, all too human lev­els. Not sure if a book that empha­sizes Rousseau’s whin­ing, fre­quent, unearned per­cep­tions of vic­tim­hood, or Hume’s empha­sis on his career is some­thing I want to spend a lot of time with. Good, acces­si­ble books on the his­tory of ideas are hard to find. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that those with a gos­sipy nature and a hook or two make it into print more eas­ily than those that take ideas far more seriously.

Two more suc­cess­ful books, when it comes to pair­ing intel­lec­tual titans:

Camus & Sartre, by Ronald Aronson
The Courtier and the Heretic, by Matthew Stewart.
The lat­ter is about Leibniz and Spinoza …

* Wittgenstein’s Poker, by the same authors, is sup­posed to be excel­lent. Have not got­ten around to it yet. On my shelf, ready for read­ing soon, is Wittgenstein Flies a Kite, by Susan Sterrett. Will prob­a­bly read that after Rousseau’s Dog.
Be Sociable, Share!

Related Posts: