ARA Review by JohnLocke84 of In It Together
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ARA Review by JohnLocke84 of In It Together
[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, In It Together.]
Not exactly clear what this book is, or purports to be. Philosophy? Hard to suggest it fits in that category, unless we wish to accord the author Socratic-like status, immunized from the requirements of dealing with the vast corpus of work that went before into some of the serious philosophical subjects that are touched upon within its pages. Four notes and the occasional reference to Richard Dawkins or René Descartes isn't going to prompt a serious philosophical examination of this work--and that isn't snobbish gatekeeping from the academy; any student of philosophy does and should demand more of works with as much pretension as this one.
Stream of consciousness style musings, collected into chapter headings? That seems a fair and accurate description. Whether you can get to the end depends on how much credibility and patience you're willing to afford the unearned (not that one could earn such a thing, anyway) guru tone of the work. Hard to call it polemical, unless one means stridently insistent and self-important by that term.
The theme? Love is important? Original for sure; we haven't seen it before. Most world philosophers, theologians, and the like end at the opposite conclusion. Restating a central thesis of the Cartesian/Platonic worldview also hardly counts as a new or groundbreaking contribution to what is a very old conversation within philosophical circles. Being told there is no problem of evil without any serious attempt to deal with very obvious (seemingly) examples of evil from the past and present is also going to be cold comfort to any real-life victim of unspeakable atrocity and crime--and fairly useless to those of us inhabiting a real world seemingly full of the challenges and consequences of things that sure look like evil.
Ultimately, the message of the book seems to be a deterministic fatalism of accepting what is as mostly unchangeable and largely unimportant anyway (because of its unchangeability?). Again, this short road to nihilism--which the author wishes to avoid with the tocsin of "love"--is hardly an innovative way of dealing with the real questions of philosophy that serious minds grapple with. Blowing off all the devastating refutations of such arguments--not even bothering to demolish strawman versions of them--does not mean you "win" the argument. It simply means that anyone who wants to pursue this line of reasoning in a serious way will have to go elsewhere. Plato, for instance? Or any of the determinist philosophers from Augustine to Marx.
Ultimately, that is where readers should have gone in the first place if they wanted a serious discussion of the issues this book sort of tries to address, poorly.
1/5
***
View In It Together on Bookshelves
Not exactly clear what this book is, or purports to be. Philosophy? Hard to suggest it fits in that category, unless we wish to accord the author Socratic-like status, immunized from the requirements of dealing with the vast corpus of work that went before into some of the serious philosophical subjects that are touched upon within its pages. Four notes and the occasional reference to Richard Dawkins or René Descartes isn't going to prompt a serious philosophical examination of this work--and that isn't snobbish gatekeeping from the academy; any student of philosophy does and should demand more of works with as much pretension as this one.
Stream of consciousness style musings, collected into chapter headings? That seems a fair and accurate description. Whether you can get to the end depends on how much credibility and patience you're willing to afford the unearned (not that one could earn such a thing, anyway) guru tone of the work. Hard to call it polemical, unless one means stridently insistent and self-important by that term.
The theme? Love is important? Original for sure; we haven't seen it before. Most world philosophers, theologians, and the like end at the opposite conclusion. Restating a central thesis of the Cartesian/Platonic worldview also hardly counts as a new or groundbreaking contribution to what is a very old conversation within philosophical circles. Being told there is no problem of evil without any serious attempt to deal with very obvious (seemingly) examples of evil from the past and present is also going to be cold comfort to any real-life victim of unspeakable atrocity and crime--and fairly useless to those of us inhabiting a real world seemingly full of the challenges and consequences of things that sure look like evil.
Ultimately, the message of the book seems to be a deterministic fatalism of accepting what is as mostly unchangeable and largely unimportant anyway (because of its unchangeability?). Again, this short road to nihilism--which the author wishes to avoid with the tocsin of "love"--is hardly an innovative way of dealing with the real questions of philosophy that serious minds grapple with. Blowing off all the devastating refutations of such arguments--not even bothering to demolish strawman versions of them--does not mean you "win" the argument. It simply means that anyone who wants to pursue this line of reasoning in a serious way will have to go elsewhere. Plato, for instance? Or any of the determinist philosophers from Augustine to Marx.
Ultimately, that is where readers should have gone in the first place if they wanted a serious discussion of the issues this book sort of tries to address, poorly.
1/5
***
View In It Together on Bookshelves
