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The dustcover intrigued me: how do we take the best of modern science and modern philosophy and construct a framework to help us live a fulfilling life. What the dustcover should have said is: how do we live a meaningful life according to Massimo. The writer attempts to cover a very large surface area, spanning everything from morality, to love, to God. Unfortunately, the end result is "mile wide, inch deep". I could live with that if the end result were sound, but what bothers me about this book is that Massimo dismisses frameworks he disagrees with by making statements like "it is obvious" or "it is reasonable" without providing a coherent and cogent argument to support it. I personally agreed with him in most cases, but that is not substitute for a deductive argument. In other cases the writer brings up the most extreme statements made by an advocate of a theory/framework he disagrees with (as in the case of evolutionary psychology) and then promptly dismisses the whole paradigm on that basis alone.
In summary I would say that if you have done some reading about philosophy and evolutionary sciences this book can be seen as entertaining banter with a well informed friend with set opinions. If, on the other hand, you are looking for an introduction - or if you are looking for what the dustcover advertises: a philosophically and scientifically grounded guide to a more fulfilling life, I would suggest you look elsewhere.
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28 of 33 people found the following review helpful
"This book is about what philosophy and science together can tell us concerning the big questions in life, and if we want to understand these questions in a new light we also need to look under the hood, so to speak. We will employ not only the logical scalpel of philosophy to parse what people mean by the different ideas that guide their lives but also the microscope of science to try to figure out how and why people behave in certain ways." ... "The basic idea is that there are some things that ought to matter, whatever problem we experience in life: the facts that are pertinent to said problem; the values that guide us as we evaluate those facts; the nature of the problem itself; any possible solutions to it; and the meaningfulness to us of those facts and values and their relevance to the quality of our life. Since science is uniquely well suited to deal with factual knowledge and philosophy deals with (among other things) values, sci-phi [shorthand for science-philosophy] seems like a promising way to approach the perennial questions concerning how we construct the meaning of our existence."
I hope these two quotes cover the gist of Professor Pigliucci's book. That said, this book has one major advantage, which also leads to its biggest disadvantage I believe - breadth of subject matter. Pigliucci has run through and tackled some of the biggest topics of interest to both professional philosophers as well as specialized scientists. He discusses a little bit of everything: evolution, morality, religion, decision-making, politics, free will, nature versus nurture, love, and friendship. He both introduces the reader to the issue and then encapsulates the puzzles which academics struggle with out in the field. I enjoyed reading what Pigliucci had to say regarding the different subjects.Read more ›
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Philosophy, or the love of wisdom traditionally is regarded as a manner of exploring broad, difficult questions about the nature of life, thinking, and ethics. Part of philosophical thinking is determining whether and how this can be done. In his new book, "Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy can Lead us to a More Meaningful Life" Professor Massimo Pigliucci, develops tentative approaches and tentative answers to philosophical questions through an approach he calls "Sci-Phi" -- a combination of the best of science and philosophy. Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. He holds three PhD's in genetics, biology, and philosophy of science. He puts his formidable learning and intellect to work in informing science with philosophy, and the other way around. This was my first exposure to Pigliucci's work. He is a prolific writer and editor who has partaken in many controversies and debates surrounding the theory of evolution in particular and who maintains an active presence on the web explaining his scientifically influenced, secular philosophizing.
"Answers for Aristotle" is an engagingly written, sweeping introductory account of how science and philosophy together can provide guidance to understanding and to living a rewarding, meaningful life. Pigliucci sees the Greek philosopher Aristotle as the first thinker who attempted to integrate the science of his day with philosophy. As both science and philosophy developed, they diverged. Pigliucci wants to bring them together. Aristotle is also a dominant philosophical influence, particularly in ethics. Aristotle found that the good life consisted in a state and activity he called eudamonia, or human flourishing. Pigliucci agrees and expands upon Aristotle's account.Read more ›
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful
"Answers for Aristotle" by Massimo Pigliucci: The thesis of this book is that the answer to life's great questions--morality, justice, love,gods, etc.--can be understood by combining the empirical evidence of science and the value judgments of philosophy--SciPhi as the author terms it. The science he is referring to is evolutionary biology, cognitive science, psychology and even softer stuff, and the philosophy is mostly Aristotle/Socrates with a little Hume, Kant and others thrown in. The scientific state-of-the-art is using MRI to measure blood flow rates in different parts of the brain when different mental tasks are undertaken or different chemicals are ingested, which allows an association of various parts of the brain with various subjects and an indication of the effect of drugs on brain function. The book is valuable for the insight it provides on the status of this sort of scientific research and for relating it to the philosophy of Aristotle, who it appears was mostly right in this arena, in contrast to the fate of his ideas in the physical sciences, but then the bio sciences are in their early days. The breadth of the author's knowledge is impresssive, and he has done us a service by pulling all of this together into an accessible form.
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