(Bloomsbury, £16.99)
Philosophy, the great 19th-century German thinker GWF Hegel said, is its own era “comprehended in thought.” AC Grayling takes a similar view. “Every generation,” he writes, “needs to attempt an interpretation of the time it lives in.”
This book contains more than 60 “philosophical reflections” on the spirit of our age, several of them originally published in Prospect. They are “philosophical,” Grayling suggests, in that they attempt to excavate the fundamental principles that lie beneath matters of wide public concern. The range of topics he covers is impressively broad, taking in subjects as diverse as the ethics of drone warfare, the nature of the mind and the meaning of happiness.
Grayling writes his own job description in a discussion of the idea of the “public intellectual” (for which he thinks the label “philosopher” is a plausible synonym): the formation of “informed and considered views about many things.” “Informed and considered” also nicely describes his urbane and eminently reasonable intellectual style. Indeed, he’s reasonable to a fault—so much so that the righteous anger he works himself up to in the final section on “making the world a better place” strikes a somewhat jarring note.
At his best, Grayling is a tough-minded proponent of the kind of enlightened rationalism expounded by several of the public intellectuals with whom he declares an affinity here: Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, to name only three. But he’s more historically-minded than Russell, less dogmatic than Dawkins and less in thrall to the charms of his own fluency than Hitchens.
Philosophy, the great 19th-century German thinker GWF Hegel said, is its own era “comprehended in thought.” AC Grayling takes a similar view. “Every generation,” he writes, “needs to attempt an interpretation of the time it lives in.”
This book contains more than 60 “philosophical reflections” on the spirit of our age, several of them originally published in Prospect. They are “philosophical,” Grayling suggests, in that they attempt to excavate the fundamental principles that lie beneath matters of wide public concern. The range of topics he covers is impressively broad, taking in subjects as diverse as the ethics of drone warfare, the nature of the mind and the meaning of happiness.
Grayling writes his own job description in a discussion of the idea of the “public intellectual” (for which he thinks the label “philosopher” is a plausible synonym): the formation of “informed and considered views about many things.” “Informed and considered” also nicely describes his urbane and eminently reasonable intellectual style. Indeed, he’s reasonable to a fault—so much so that the righteous anger he works himself up to in the final section on “making the world a better place” strikes a somewhat jarring note.
At his best, Grayling is a tough-minded proponent of the kind of enlightened rationalism expounded by several of the public intellectuals with whom he declares an affinity here: Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, to name only three. But he’s more historically-minded than Russell, less dogmatic than Dawkins and less in thrall to the charms of his own fluency than Hitchens.
