Customer Reviews

Philosophy for Beginners (Writers and Readers Documentary Comic Book)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book was my most quoted book that I used on my way to a BA in Philosophy. This book will give one a solid foundation in Philosophy in about four to five hours. This is an Analytical philosopher's view point though.

The book goes through the history in a very concise, sometimes oversimplified method. It is a quick read. It also boils down ideas in an excellent manner most of the time.

I have to suggest that one should read the original philosophical text or a good reader to go further in a subject area. This book is a great jumping off point though.

Good luck and Thanks for your time.

Having studied Philosophy formally through 2 Universities, I can honestly say that I got a better BIG PICTURE of Western philosophy from this book. The combined mediums of text and cartoon makes a potentially door subject very accessible.

What a wonderful little book. Philosophy for Beginners covers the full sweep of Western philosophy, from the earliest Greek thinkers through Derrida, in just under 200 pages. Even better, most of the material is presented in a comic-book format. With this little book it is truly possible to review the progress (?) of Western philosophy in an evening's read.

Obviously the challenge for Osborne is to present something meaningful and intelligible about various thinkers and schools of thought in such a brief survey. And he does so in a way that is both fair, based on my knowledge, and refreshingly humorous. Even as a "not quite" beginner I found this little book enlightening.

There are a few caveats. First, this is very much a survey of Western philosophy, which is not immediately clear from the title. Little attention is paid to other philosophic traditions. Second, some of the discussion of current thinkers is difficult to follow. But it is my sense that this has more to do with the complexity of what those thinkers are attempting and our lack of distance from their thinking. No doubt in a hundred years we will be able to do a better job of presenting what seems today to be plethora of different thinkers and approaches. But there is no reason to wait when you can get started with this fun little book.

I was also very disappointed with this book. Philosophy is a great subject for "For Beginners" style books, since academic philosophy is ubiquitous (despite misconceptions that it has little relation to the "real world"), important and little understood by non-philosophers. Many people think they know what it is, but that knowing usually involves colloquialisms, maxims and cliches while being unfamiliar with many of the most basic problems in academic philosophy (and consequentially a ignorance of the terms of those problems). So, books of this kind are certainly necessary and invaluable if executed skillfully.

Unfortunately, Philosophy for Beginners is not executed skillfully. I agree with a previous reviewer that it is not always easy to pinpoint what is so dissatisfying about this book, but it falls short of your hopes consistently.

Specific problems, at least in the edition I reviewed, range from proofreading--there are a number of misspellings--to editing and content. The first few pages are promising. Among the questions proposed are "Why does philosophy give some people a headache, others a real buzz, and yet others a feeling that it is subversive and dangerous?" "Why do a lot of people think philosophy is totally irrelevant?" "What is philosophy anyway?" and the slightly less serious "How can you recognize a philosopher in the street?" It then promises that these questions will try to be answered. Yet, beyond the next page's reiteration of the etymological definition (philosophy=love of wisdom) and quotes from Gramsci and Russell that would not mean much to someone in the target audience (the academic philosophy beginner trying to understand just what philosophy is all about), none of these questions are ever answered.

From that point, the book is primarily a less than adequate (and sometimes misleading as it has some chronological deviations) history of philosophy. Too often, what I would consider figures on the fringes of academic philosophy are featured--literary figures, psychologists, etc. at the expense of "formal" philosophers, some important examples of whom are completely ignored and some of whom are glanced over in one short paragraph. Again, this is not very helpful for someone trying to get a grasp on just what academic philosophy is, and if the aim is to talk about some ambiguous colloquial sense of "philosophy", it seems strange that academic philosophers would be stressed as much as they are. Admittedly, part of the problem may be that I lean more toward the analytic tradition, while based on the emphasized content of the book, Osborne seems to favor continentalism. (If you are a beginner, you will not understand the significance of that, and unfortunately, Osborne's book will not explain it to you very well, although it does give a cursory definition of analyticism.)

On the other hand, leaning towards continentalism probably wasn't the source of this book's inadequacies--the best books to date on philosophy for beginners, in my opinion, are _Looking at Philosophy_ and _Does The Center Hold?_ by Donald Palmer, and he leans towards continentalism. Both of those books are a bit longer on text and a bit shorter on cartoons and illustrations, but there are cartoons and illustrations on almost every page, and they are actually funny and help give you a perspective on the material. (When the Osborne book's cartoons are funny, it is more because of inside "philosophers' jokes" and references that are not mentioned in the text and that no beginner is likely to understand.) Palmer's books cover all the major philosophers from Thales through Sartre (which is one of its shortcomings--some of the most important stuff in philosophy has happened after Sartre), all of the major issues in all of the major subdisciplines, and _Looking at Philosophy_ presents the history of philosophy as more of a point-counterpoint continuum, rooted in historical and sociological perspectives--which I feel is more instructive.

This book introduces the great names of the western philosophy in a chronological order, together with some of their most influential thoughts. It is presented as a comic book which is easy to read, but at the same time, will not give you any depth of the topics it covers. So if this is really your first book in philosophy, you may still be hanging out there with a fuzzy idea what philosophy is all about. You definitely need another more formal introductory book for a better grasp of the topic. But if you are gonna do so, this book serves its purpose.

The book is roughly divided into 4 parts (the author did not give any sections to the time-line though), namely the pre-medieval philosophy (p.1-57) Renaissance and the Age of Reason (p.58-99), the Enlightenment (p.100-152), and the contemporary philosophy (p.153-182). Personally I am more interested in the history of philosophy during the 18th and 19th century, and this book gave me a condensed tutorial on main ideas such as idealism/materialism, Hegelianism/positivism etc. It is always a good idea to look up the web (or other reference) once more to make sure the terms didn't get mis-interpreted.

I think this book is also good for kids, with all its comic strips and concise descriptions. If you have kids at home, it is a good idea to have books such as this one around.

I rather enjoyed this book and sourced it out after reading a library copy some years ago which left an impression on me.

A good starting point I suppose and one that doesn't scare off the reader.

This book covers the entire development of philosophy in an interesting, easy to read format. It is packed with information, and is a good reference book, too.

This book by Osborne is an interesting brief introduction to the course of Western philosophy over the past 2500 years. It does not directly involve non-Western philosophies; a simple look at the introduction will show the standard progression of names and ideas from the pre-Socratic Greeks through the philosophers of the classical age, to Christendom, then Enlightenment, post-Enlightentment through to modern thinkers whose names often adorned the faculty lists of Western institutions as much as their names dominate the philosophy coursework today. However, on occasion as historical reality might require, there is a discussion of other cultures. For example, Osborne mentions both the Tang dynasty of China and the rising Muslim empire as both being more advanced than Christendom during the period around 1000.

Of course, much of what is considered 'philosophy' outside of the Western framework is often more of a spirituality or mystical task than one that is properly philosophical. On the other hand, Osborne tries to define philosophy in the first few pages, with the help of Plato, Gramsci, Marx, and Russell, and comes to a sort of non-conclusion. Osborne's sense of humour, well established in this book, starts here, by his play with the idea that whereas Plato though philosophers should rule the world to set everything to rights, other philosophers speak of the meaninglessness of everything, which would leave one with no content or ideas, which would make ruling rather difficult.

One of the drawbacks of this text is that it does not have the time or space to go in much depth on any of the topics represented. This is more or less a who's who of philosophy, giving some basic outlines of their thinking and showing in broad strokes the general trends of philosophy over time. I cannot really speak to how I would understand philosophy using this as an early text, as I came to it after some considerable philosophical education, but my impression is that it might leave a rather thin understanding in many areas.

Fortunately, Osborne provides a bibliography, both of basic survey texts and of more advanced primary texts and studies. I'd like to see more done with this. Osborne does often refer to the primary texts in the narrative stories of the philosophers so that readers will become acquainted with them. Hopefully this will prove a motivation for further reading.

There is a subtle (occasionally not-so-subtle) anti-Christian and anti-religious bias in the book. When discussing the fate of Hypatia, a deplorable event no matter who carried it out, he ascribes the blame not to the particular people involved, but with an off-the-cuff remark slams the whole of Christianity. Similarly, he offers Bertrand Russell's quote about philosophy being a no-man's land between theology and science, embattled from each side; odd how many theologians feel theology is embattled between science and philosophy -- I did note as well that there are no pointedly anti-scientific jabs the way there are against religion.

This is a rather minor criticism, however, and probably one that most people wouldn't notice too greatly. It is true that the church and freedom of inquiry has not always been synonymous (to say the least) but there are better ways of approaching the issue.

The presentation is an attempt, largely successful, to render into an interesting format a topic that frightens or bores many people today. Why is philosophy irrelevant to most? Again, this is a good question, asked at the beginning, and difficult to answer. This probably needs to answered by each reader for herself or himself; hopefully the reader will make it all the way through the book. It also asks the question, how can you tell if someone is a philosopher. Of course, you can always accept the answer of Gramsci -- we all are, to a certain degree.

I've read several books in the 'For Beginners' series. They are often used in graduate and undergraduate classes to help people ease their way into difficult subjects. This, as a history of philosophy, is a fairly good text.

There are two schools of thought concerning the 'For Beginners' series of texts. The subject matter that they attempt to address is tastelessly watered-down to the point of absurdity, placing serious topics such as philosophy and political thought into a superficial pop culture context. The subjects are so scandoulsly generalized that the reader comes away from the text more confused than before the reading. On the other hand, there is the view that this series presents precise introductions to otherwise dense material, paving the way for further study. My opinion tends towards the latter, because these texts are in fact precise, honing down the ideas in a language that can be understood by intelligent people with a desire to understand the subject under discussion. In ~Philosophy~ a vast amount of material is touched on from the pre-Socratics to Derrida's post structuralism. A ambitious project, but Richard Osbourne along with Ralph Edney as illustrator has managed to pull it off with accuracy, humour and elegance.

This publication is not presenting itself as anything else other than what it is - an overview of western philosophy from the early Greeks to present time. Having some background in philosophy, personally the sections on the Dark Ages, Holy Roman Empire, and the rise of Scholasticism in the first millennia was informative, reminding me of the huge influence St Thomas Aquinas had at the time - his famous 'Summa contra Gentiles', which set out to prove to non Christians, through natural reason, the importance of Chrisianity and the existence of God. Interestingly, the author's at the end of the Aquinas section comment that the explanation concerning the philosopher's thought was a bit "sketchy, but it's only a Beginner's Guide." This was a subtle cue from the author's that this text is in fact only an introduction and not to expect much more.

This book is an appropriate beginning to a vast and complex subject. If this text sparks some interest, the bibliography at the back is divided into Introductory, Advanced and General references, including a few excellent books to read if one plans to pursue the subject further. Osborne et al, have done a terrific job of tackling such a notoriously difficult subject and making it interesting and accessible.

Because of the broad scope of philosophy, one does not know where to begin in the subject. This book is a great place to start for it gives a historical overview of philosophy and its philosophers. Starting from the ancient Greeks all the way to Structuralism. Giving short and concise prescriptions of different philosophers of all the major and most influential subjects. From existentialism to the sophists to the age of reason and phenomenology. Highly reccomended for those just getting into philosophy and looking for a place to start.