In Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design, the authors take aim at that most seemingly irrelevant of fields: philosophy. They pose some of the big questions about the universe and existence and dismissively write: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.”
Have I, then, just wasted a great deal of my time in reading A. C. Grayling’s new book The History of Philosophy? The answer is an unequivocal no. Grayling’s book shows us the enduring value and relevance of philosophy—so, while I agree with Hawking and Mlodinow on the importance of science in answering questions, I reject their view that philosophy has nothing left to say.
As Grayling points out, modern science is a result of philosophy asking the right questions about metaphysics and epistemology, and philosophy also contributed to the creation of the social sciences and cognitive science. Philosophical debates on concepts in ethics, morality, epistemology, methodology, politics, aesthetics and even science are still important, for it is through philosophical conversation that progress has been made in these fields and it is through philosophy that clarity in concepts is achieved and relevant questions are asked.
Science is the surest way to knowledge about the universe and has much to say about traditionally philosophical concerns, but this does not mean that philosophy is dead: on the contrary, areas outside of science, such as ethics, still require the philosophical touch, and science itself is at its best when working in partnership with the concerns and methods of philosophical questioning (until quite recently natural philosophy meant what we now call science). The writings of Daniel Dennett, for one, are exemplars of philosophy and science working together for mutual enrichment.
The enduring value of philosophy is one of the central themes of Grayling’s exceptional new book. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, Grayling takes us through the field from its beginnings to the present day, throwing in a comparative study of Indian, Arabic-Persian, Chinese and African philosophy along the way. The book is a triumph—”a philosopher’s magnum opus” as the Edinburgh International Book Festival has described it.
The history of philosophy is a big field and it takes a steady and expert hand to guide a reader through it. Grayling, a longtime proponent of philosophy in public life, achieves this. The general reader, the student and even the scholar will come away from the book having learned a great deal. It is comprehensive yet concise, complex yet clear. Ranging through everything from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, the scholastics of the Middle Ages and the humanists of the Renaissance to twentieth-century analytic and Continental philosophy, Grayling takes us on an intellectual adventure, expertly explaining the concepts and debates which have been most salient through the centuries: from Lockean political theory to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, via Hume’s moral philosophy, Kantian epistemology and metaphysics and much else besides.
Grayling likens this story to a on-going conversation. We humans, he argues, find ourselves in a tiny point of light surrounded by darkness and ignorance. Each discipline has its own special spotlight as it peers out into the dark. Philosophy “patrols the circumference” of these spots of illumination: in each case extending the little bit of light just that bit further. It tries to posit the right questions to aid this goal, focusing especially on areas in which there are as yet no special disciplines, thus helping us progress towards finding reasonable answers and reducing our ignorance.
The story of philosophy is also likened to case law: the thinkers of the past are our touchstones in present enquiries. We read and study them to provide inspiration and clarity in dealing with current concerns. Plato, Aristotle and Kant, Grayling writes, are the three greatest philosophers in terms of their intellectual powers, even if their work is often disagreed with. That too is why we look back—we formulate rebuttals of certain strands of thinking in order to provide context and ballast for our preferred ones: it is all dialectic, a concept for which we have the pre-Socratic thinker Zeno to thank, according to Aristotle.
One thing in particular marks out this book from other such histories: theology is explicitly excluded. For, Grayling says, “if the starting point for reflection is acceptance of a religious doctrine, then the reflection that follows is theology, or theodicy, or exegesis, or casuistry, or apologetics, or hermeneutics, but it is not philosophy.” Philosophy is agriculture and theology is gardening, as Grayling puts it: “[philosophy] is a very much bigger, broader, and more varied enterprise than the particular, localized and focused one of ‘talking or theorizing about a god.’” Thus, the Church Fathers and the religious aspects of, say, Augustine, are omitted and theology is only discussed as it relates to philosophy proper, such as when it tries to posit philosophical arguments for the existence of a deity or impinges on ideas about free will, determinism and society.
This will no doubt cause some heads to explode, but it is correct. The long, dull and dreary debates of theology are irrelevant to philosophical enquiry because they take as given the truth of religion and focus on concepts within that tradition, rather than asking the bigger and more important questions in which philosophy deals.
Grayling is a critic of religion, but he deals impartially with the medieval religious thinkers and expresses admiration at their progress in fields such as logic. He takes seriously, too, some of the more esoteric of the Continental philosophers, though he takes great care to explain why some of them, such as Michel Foucault, do not merit full inclusion in the philosophical canon—essentially, their contributions are in sociology, cultural criticism and the like, rather than philosophy as such—he briefly considers these excluded thinkers in a section called “Un Salon des Refusés.”
There is one rather amusing—and understandable—lapse of impartiality when Grayling deals with Jacques Derrida’s prodigious literary output: “it is hard to see how to avoid the charge that if he is right [about deconstructing philosophy etc.], forty books about it would be thirty-nine (perhaps even forty) too many.” Grayling also discusses the differences between analytic and Continental philosophy; the former, he says, sometimes sees the latter as consisting of pseudo-profundity and fraudulent thinkers. But Grayling deals with these thinkers impartially (for the most part) and finds great value in the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Paul Ricoeur.
The section on twentieth-century philosophy is the busiest. Grayling marshals a veritable cavalcade of thinkers and movements, which are discussed over many pages. He argues that that era is too recent to narrow all the thinkers down to a few of the greats—perhaps, in a couple of hundred years, the Kants and Aristotles of the twentieth century will have been identified, but it is impossible to tell who they are now (and increases in access to higher education and advances in communications mean that more people than ever have had the opportunity to think and write). Grayling compares philosophers to mountains and foothills: the thinkers he chooses to write about in the book represent the highest peaks of philosophical thought, and they are surrounded by other thinkers, who may be important but have to be excluded in order to deal with the most influential.
Unusually, for a single volume history of philosophy, Grayling also covers eastern traditions. The book focuses on western philosophy, in which he is more of an expert, but he has a great interest in other traditions. The Indian, Chinese, Arabic-Persian and African traditions are briefly covered in the book’s final section, which, though not as comprehensive, is as lucid and informative as the rest.
Grayling enthuses about the complexity and sophistication of ancient Indian epistemology, logic and metaphysics, and incisively compares Indian and other traditions to western ideas. Philosophy flourished in China, India and the Greek world at around the same time: Socrates, Buddha and Confucius were approximate contemporaries, and the traditions that flowed from them exerted enormous influence on subsequent discourse in their respective cultures.
But we must be wary of such iconic figures: many of their ideas come down to us from text written many years after their time, and much legend and superstition has sprung up around some, particularly the Buddha. These thinkers were lucky, Grayling says—it was their followers who tended to be more original. Perhaps their ideas were intrinsically good, or perhaps they were simply easier for the populace to understand and that was why they were adopted— after all these thinkers were only a few of the many roving teachers and preachers of the era. Alluding to Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Grayling wonders how many geniuses of antiquity have been forgotten, their words never written down.
Discussing Arabic-Persian philosophy (a label used in place of the misnomer Islamic philosophy) Grayling wonders how history might have turned out had more humanistic Classical philosophy survived in the Islamic world—might something similar to the European Renaissance have occurred? This is merely an aside but, as with so much else in this book, it prompts a great deal of thought.
This section of the book is a lament: for the Islamic world experienced a golden age of philosophy for a few centuries in the Middle Ages, before religious orthodoxy exerted its grip and choked free enquiry. What would have become of that world if Islam had allowed more Averroes to flourish—instead of al-Ghazalis? Even the Shia branch of Islam, more conducive to philosophy than the Sunni, has not produced many great philosophers since that time—a true shame. In this, west and east converge, for early Christians burned pagan philosophy and Christianity rejected those Classical ideas that conflicted with its theology. It was through transmissions from the Islamic world that Europe rediscovered many lost works from antiquity (though, of course, medieval Christians, like medieval Muslims, did not reject Classical thought tout court: Aquinas reconciled Aristotelian philosophy with theology in Thomism, which became, and remains, the official philosophical doctrine of the Catholic Church).
African philosophy is only dealt with briefly. This is because there is no identifiable written African philosophical tradition, and to take an ethnophilosophical approach would be to loosen the definition of philosophy too much. Such approaches have been critiqued by some African philosophers, such as Kwasi Wiredu, themselves. Grayling takes care, however, to show that this is not a denigration of Africa, for it has diverse cultural, historical, social and linguistic traditions of great beauty and importance. With further study, philosophical doctrines concerning epistemology and metaphysics may be mined from African traditions—but “it does however need not to be ethnography masquerading as philosophy.”
There is, however, one great philosophical idea that has arisen from Africa: the ethical doctrine of Ubuntu, an essentially humanist viewpoint, emphasising our interconnectedness with each other—“I am, because of you” is how Grayling sums it up. Such realist ethics are superior to the unachievable universal love doctrines of, say, Mohism and Christianity. Grayling writes: “It is appropriate that as humankind itself came out of Africa, so one of the best ideas about how it can flourish—the idea of Ubuntu—should emanate from there too.”
Some critics may find Grayling’s book too narrow, focusing overmuch on the west, and feel that its treatment of non-western traditions is too thin. However, Grayling explicitly acknowledges his expertise in western philosophy and the reader is given to understand that his brief overview of other philosophical traditions and concepts does not represent a comprehensive examination of them.
Then there is the lack of women thinkers in the book. This is a more understandable criticism, but it too does not quite stand up. As Grayling says, the book is a study of the case law of philosophy, the thinkers and schools who have exerted the most influence on its big themes and questions. While there have been many women philosophers, none have achieved the status of the most important thinkers who address the core questions of philosophy. Grayling laments that Simone de Beauvoir, for example, is overshadowed by Sartre (she is discussed in the section devoted to him)—but attributes this to the historical exclusion of women, and adds that hopefully this will change and her influence in her own right will be appreciated more fully in time.
There is also a brief but sympathetic discussion of feminist philosophy in the twentieth century and Grayling is unequivocal that, in the history of twenty-first century philosophy, the feminist schools will be among the most important. Criticisms of Grayling’s book as anti-feminist therefore fall wide of the mark.
Philosophy and philosophers are often seen as boring and dreary: another misconception. The ideas, while complex, are anything but boring, as the book shows. But Grayling also reminds us that philosophers themselves have often been involved in politics and wider society and lived tumultuous lives. Boethius was executed for suspected conspiracy and Bertrand Russell was imprisoned twice for his political principles, to give but two examples.
The History of Philosophy is an excellent overview of great philosophical thought by an insightful practitioner of the field. It is a credit to Grayling’s abilities that he has penned such a perspicuous book on some very difficult subjects—giving the a reader a clear overview of the complexities of Scholastic logic, Analytic philosophies of language and mind, and much else besides is no easy feat, but Grayling has achieved it. This is a book to be treasured, both as a guide to the subject and as a beautiful piece of writing in itself, containing great insight and wisdom. It is a testament to the continuing importance and value of philosophy.