A Little History of Philosophy kitaplarını, A Little History of Philosophy sözleri ve alıntılarını, A Little History of Philosophy yazarlarını, A Little History of Philosophy yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.
31 inanılmaz derecede önemli insan hakkında 252 sayfalık bir kitaptan tam olarak beklediğiniz şey bu. Bundan önce Sophie'nin dünyasını okudum ve bu kitapta adı geçen filozofların çok küçük bir bölümünü kapsamasına rağmen, bundan daha detaylı olduğunu hissediyorum. Ama bu kitapta diğerinde olmayan bilgiler var, bu yüzden benim için çok faydalı oldu.
Felsefe hakkında okuyup bize anlatan birinin YouTube videosu gibi temel bir giriş kitabı. (Örneğin, Freud ile ilgili bölümde Id, ego ve süper egodan bahsetmiyor bile. Ama insanlar arasındaki anlaşmaları / anlaşmazlıkları içermesi ve kimin kimden ilham aldığını veya kimin aleyhinde olduğunu belirtmesini gerçekten beğendim. Sanırım Sophie'nin Dünyası'ndan sonra bunu okumak ve sonra filozofların eserlerine (biyografileri ve Okuyucununki ile birlikte) teker teker girmeye başlamak doğru bir başlangıç oldu.
Felsefe göz korkutucu bir konu gibi görünebilir - ve bu kitabı okumadan önce, felsefe okuma fikrim, gündelik hayatla alakasız göründükleri için belirsiz, uzun, eski moda metinleri içeriyordu. Fakat bu kitap beni felsefenin erişilebilir olabileceğini ve hayatlarımızı nasıl yaşadığımız üzerinde büyük bir etkisi olabileceğine ikna etti. Eski Yunanlılardan günümüze kadar iki bin yıllık filozofların fikirlerini özetlemekle kalmıyor, aynı zamanda okuyucuyu, yani sizi soru sormaya da teşvik ediyor. Felsefe başkalarının fikirlerini öğrenmek ve tekrarlamak değil, düşünmek, sorgulamak ve kendi sonucunuza varmakla ilgilidir.
Warburton ayrıca felsefenin soyut bir kavram olmadığını, günlük yaşananlardan büyük ölçüde etkilendiğini ve yaşamlarımızı etkilediğini açıkça ortaya koyuyor. Hobbes'un güçlü bir devlete olan arzusunun İngiliz İç Savaşı anarşisi korkusundan geldiğini ve Nazilerin Nietzsche felsefesinin “üstün ırk” fikrini soykırım gerekçesi olarak nasıl çarpıttıklarını açıklıyor.
Felsefe hakkında bir yargıya varmadan önce bu kitabı deneyin. Çok çeşitli konuları kısaca inceleyerek, özellikle ilgilendiğiniz konuları bulma şansı edineceksiniz...
"You’re in a garden where you know there is a pond. There’s a
splash and some shouting. You realize that a young child has
fallen in and may be drowning. What do you do? Do you walk
by? Even if you’d promised to meet a friend and stopping would
make you late, you’d surely treat the child’s life as more impor-
tant than being on time. The pond is quite shallow, but very
muddy. You’ll ruin your best shoes if you help. But don’t expect
other people to understand if you don’t jump in. This is about
being human and valuing life. A child’s life is so much more
valuable than any pair of shoes, even a very expensive pair.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is some kind of monster. You’d
jump into the water, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. But
then you’re also probably rich enough to prevent a child in
Africa from dying of hunger or of a curable tropical disease.
That probably wouldn’t take much more than the price of the
shoes you’d be prepared to ruin by saving the child in the pond."
"You’re sitting in a room. There is a door into the room with a
letterbox. Every now and then a piece of card with a squiggle
shape drawn on it comes through the door and drops on your
doormat. Your task is to look up the squiggle in a book that
is on the table in the room. Each squiggle is paired with
another symbol in the book. You have to find your squiggle in
the book, look at the symbol it is paired with, and then find
a bit of card with a symbol that matches it from a pack in the
room. You then carefully push that bit of card out through your
letterbox. That’s it. You do this for a while and wonder what’s
going on."
"Perhaps you’re wealthy. Perhaps you’re super-rich. But most of
us aren’t, and some people are very poor, so poor that they
spend most of their short lives hungry and sick. This doesn’t
seem fair or right – and it surely isn’t. If there were true justice
in the world no children would starve while others have so
much money that they don’t know what to do with it. Everyone
who is sick would have access to good medical treatment. The
poor of Africa wouldn’t be so much worse off than the poor in
the USA and Britain. The rich of the West wouldn’t be so many
thousand times as rich as those who through no fault of their
own were born into disadvantage. Justice is about treating
people fairly. There are people around us whose lives are filled
with good things, and others who, through no fault of their
own, get few choices about how they survive: they can’t choose
the job they do, or even the town where they live. Some people
who think about these inequalities will just say, ‘Oh well, life’s not fair’ and shrug their shoulders. These are usually the ones
who have been particularly lucky; others will spend time
thinking about how society could be better organized and
perhaps try to change it to make it fairer."
"You are out for a walk one day and see a runaway train hurtling
down the tracks towards five workers. The driver is uncon-
scious, possibly as the result of a heart attack. If nothing is done,
all will die. The train will squash them. It’s travelling much too
fast for them to get out of the way. There is, however, one hope.
There is a fork in the tracks just before the five men, and on the
other line there is only one worker. You are close enough to
the points to flick the switch and make the train veer away
from the five and kill the single worker. Is killing this innocent
man the right thing to do? In terms of numbers it clearly is: you
save five people by killing just one. That must maximize happi-
ness. To most people this seems the right thing to do. In real life
it would be very difficult to flick that switch and watch someone
die as a result, but it would be even worse to hold back and
watch five times as many people die."
"In 1666 a young scientist was sitting in a garden when an apple
fell to the ground. This made him wonder why apples fall
straight down, rather than going off to the side or upwards. The
scientist was Isaac Newton, and the incident inspired him to
come up with his theory of gravity, a theory that explained the
movements of planets as well as apples. But what happened
next? Do you think that Newton then gathered evidence that
proved beyond all doubt that his theory was true? Not according
to Karl Popper (1902–94)."
"The Nazi Adolf Eichmann was a hard-working administrator.
From 1942 he was in charge of transporting the Jews of Europe
to concentration camps in Poland, including Auschwitz. This
was part of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’: his plan to kill all Jews
living in land occupied by the German forces. Eichmann wasn’t
responsible for the policy of systematic killing – it was not his
idea. But he was heavily involved in organizing the railway
system that made it possible."
"If you found yourself at one of the seminars Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889–1951) held in Cambridge in 1940 you would very quickly
realize that you were in the presence of someone very unusual.
Most people who met him thought he was a genius. Bertrand
Russell described him as ‘passionate, profound, intense and domi-
nating’. This small Viennese man with bright blue eyes and a deep
seriousness about him would pace up and down, asking students
questions, or pause lost in thought for minutes at a time. No one
dared interrupt. He didn’t lecture from prepared notes, but thought
through the issues in front of his audience, using a series of exam-
ples to tease out what was at stake. He told his students not to
waste their time reading philosophy books; if they took such
books seriously, he said, they should throw them across the room
and get on with thinking hard about the puzzles they raised."
"If you could travel back in time to 1945 and to a café in Paris
called Les Deux Magots (‘The Two Wise Men’), you would find
yourself sitting near a small man with goggly eyes. He is
smoking a pipe and writing in a notebook. This man is Jean-
Paul Sartre (1905–80), the most famous existentialist philoso-
pher. He was also a novelist, playwright and biographer. He
lived most of his life in hotels and did most of his writing in
cafés. He didn’t look like a cult figure, but within a few years
that’s what he would become."