Customer Reviews

Students Guide To Philosophy (Guides To Major Disciplines)

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

Rather than a give the story of philosophy in 50 pages, Dr. McInerny points students of philosophy in a direction such that their philosophical studies might actually benefit their lives. The book is thus a defense of perennial philosophy, and the classical view that philosophy is something humans are "naturally" drawn to do, because it completes our lives. Dr. McInerny engages the reader in argument, as he defends this view against modern views of philosophy, and discusses the nature of certainty, common sense, and the role of science. Its most important value is the great faith in human intellect and reason, implicit throughout the book. This book would make a good beginning for college philosophy classes. A concluding bibliographical appendix by Joshua Hochschild gives a brief overview of main philosophers throughout history, and some good suggestions for reading.

Since the trauma of World War I Western culture has become sympathetic to subjective relativism and unsympathetic to objective morals: In his Preface to Morals (1929) Walter Lippmann called belief in the objectivity of good and evil the "pathetic fallacy." In his The Modern Temper (1929), Joseph Wood Krutch described emerging moral relativism and uncertainty in the 1920's, which viewed traditional morals, religious beliefs and intellectual certainties as myths that have been unmasked by advances in modern science. And in his Only Yesterday (1931), Frederick Lewis Allen wrote that 1920's-era relativism was reinforced by Einstein and Heisenberg, who had brought relativism and uncertainty into physics.

Do you believe that the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis were just the victors imposing their peculiar cultural values on the vanquished? If your answer is "yes", then you maintain a relativist view of morality. Do you believe that if the Nazis had won World War II, then it would be true to say that Jews are not persons but are merely vermin to be exterminated? If so, then you maintain a relativist view of truth. And you may also be sympathetic to the "pro-choice" view of abortion, which is based in subjectivist relativism.

On the other hand if your answers to the above questions are "no", then you are not sympathetic to relativism. And you may be interested in this book, A Student's Guide to Philosophy, by Notre Dame philosopher Ralph McInerny. Its author views Western philosophy from the perspective of the philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas.

Much of academic philosophy - including what I found while at Notre Dame University - is an irrelevant pedantic game. But this book is an authentic philosophy book by an author who believes in the philosophy he writes about. In my vividly recalled personal experience as a student in McInerny's classes I found him an authentic and ingenuous philosopher. I am not of Scholastic persuasion, but I rate this book at 5 stars.

I am an atheist and a liberal. I commend this introduction to philosophy. I find it insightful and interesting.

The reviews against it are themselves deeply biased and seem to stem from defensiveness (which is nice to see since whenever I've challenged the validity of academic philosophy, professors have not even found their careers worth defending).

McInerney is ahead of his time, but not by much. Just wait and see. Academic philosophy is, at present, an abysmal failure. Fortunately, it cannot persist in its foul state much longer. Departments are not tiny and they are not being threatened with closures because they are doing good work.

I'm nearly finished my PhD in academic philosophy and feel quite justified in saying that most of the stereotypes people hear about academic philosophy are true. There is wisdom in crowds. McInerney is on to it. The field needs to change if it is to survive, and the world needs excellent philosophy of the sort that McInerney commends: useful work aimed at real problems. It is a sad day when the Pope is cited as urging philosophers to do meaningful work, and philosophers are crying that they are insulted, that (despite the vast lack of proof) their work somehow is meaningful or that they do not need to do meaningful work, but please keep giving them their tax-paid salaries. Sometimes even the Pope is right. Do not write people off because they are Catholic. Seems these profs are not particularly wise.

I'm with Kahlil Gibran. To paraphrase him, Pity the nation whose philosophers are jugglers, whose sages grow dumb with age, whose wisest men and women are yet in the cradle.

If I sound bitter it is because I am one of a growing minority in academic philosophy who feels pushed out of it because it is so stale and ridiculous... such a shut-in and outdated field... because we actually want to do cutting edge work that makes a real difference to the world.

McInerney acknowledges that there is some excellent work being done in academic philosophy, but he accurately presents this work as an exception rather than the norm.

About the supreme judge quote and the previous reviewers insult of its usage: Huh? Can judges really appeal to relativism when making their judgments? Did you read it in context or did you just add up "mention of abortion" and "Catholic" and conclude that the claim being made does not need to be taken seriously? Anything goes? Relativism is tenable? What world do you want to live in!?! Do you have children!?!

I came to this book because, after much formal education in philosophy, I was still very confused about the problem, status, and challenge of modern philosophy. I really didn't understand the context of the "Great Conversation" that I was trying to engage. Anyway, I hate to say it, but I was disappointed by Ralph McInerny's essay.

"A Student's Guide to Philosophy" is not an introduction to philosophy for the beginner trying to get a sense of the big picture. Instead, it is the product of Dr. McInerny's lifetime of study and reflection. It is an essay of a Thomist surveying the landscape of modern philosophy. Worthwhile reading indeed -- but I'd really commend the book only to those already confident in their knowledge and appreciation of the history of philosophy.

McInerny certainly has not condescended to make his writing style accessible to the average reader who might pick up his book. Sentences like this one demonstrate how the author gets bogged down in his own overly academic parlance:

"The analysis of change into three components--subject and contrary states of the subject--and of the product of change--a subject under description--when taken on their own terms, as the first and most general things that one can say about physical objects, are as good now as they ever were" (p. 44).

Be that as it may, McInerny's essay is also more of an obituary for the modern philosophical project than an apology for Thomism -- even though the latter is what he promises at the start of the book. More advanced students of philosophy will find this interesting; beginners won't.

However, "A Student's Guide to Philosophy" contains (as an appendix) a great bibliographical essay, by Joshua Hoschschild, that is especially useful for beginners in philosophy. It's worth the small price of the book by itself. There are also, scattered throughout the text, small sidebar biographies of the great philosophers, which are actually very helpful.

By the way, if you're in the same boat as I was (educated but still confused), Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is a godsend!

Ralph McInerny is a rarely gifted philosopher, as his Gifford Lectures and prolific contribution to first rate academic philosophy indicate. This little introduction is one I found to be a jewel of book. True enough, it is not dumbed down to meet the lowest common denominator as far as the reading public is concerned. It's challenging reading, as it should be. It requires a bit of effort to read, and yet much of it is quite clearly written even for initiates. What McInerny does so well, and so relevantly, is to explain why the tradition of classical realism in philosophy is alive and well, and pointedly relevant in today's socal and academic context. Academic philosophers, who have reached the cul-de-sac of the postmodern caricature of philosophy, are living examples of the need for books like McInerny's. He rightly leads the reader through the watershed event in the history of philosophy--the "modern turn to the subject"--and shows why what goes by the name "philosophy" today is a rather sad imposter to the title. The death of philosophy, in other words, is greatly exaggerated. Such a claim relies on the acceptance of needless assumptions, some of which are sophisticated errors, while others are simply silly. One small problem I have with more than one of McInerny's books is the apparently gratuitious shots he takes at Luther and other Reformers. In this, he seems to follow one of his mentors, Jacques Maritain. I highly respect Maritain, who was the favorably treated subject of my PhD dissertation in Philosophy. However, the superficial criticisms of Luther and the Reformation appear to be an odd but inevitable thread in the otherwise sterling work of many contemporary Catholic philosophers. I hesitate even to include this observation, for fear that it might take away from the solid, commendable work McInerny has accomplished in his fine introduction, and his other excellent works. In the process of earning degress at three Catholic universities, I've always been a bit puzzled at the failure to understand Luther on the part of scholars who seemingly should know better. This is a small price to pay for the wealth of first rate philosophy found in McInerny's works--which are a needed corrective to the generally sad condition of academic philosophy today. The book is very highly recomended.

I own and have read several other titles belonging to ISI's "student guides" series and have found them to be generally informative and useful. That said, as a Philosophy major in college, I cannot recommend McInerny's guide to fellow students looking for an introductive overview of subject. While the author is no doubt a talented philosopher, the writing in this guide is very scattered. Different topics are jumped around to quite frequently, with nothing to really tie them together. I speculate that these topics are of major interest to McInerny, but that is not the point of this series. The point is to help students understand philosophy as part of a classic liberal education, and in that regard, I found the book wanting.

The book also presumes that the reader has a strong background in philosophy already, thus making the material more suitable for graduate, rather than undergraduate, students.

Overall, while the book has some redeeming points (ie the argument for first principles against skeptics), there are other better guides out there for students on the subject of philosophy. I would still recommend other titles in this "Student's Guide" series, however, primarily the ones pertaining to Psychology (Daniel N. Robinson) and Political Philosophy (Harvey C. Mansfield).

This work purports to be an introduction for students and any interested people to philosophy. It isn't. If it's an introduction to anything at all, it's an introduction to Thomism.
Philosophy is a richly diverse field, though you wouldn't know it from reading this book. In fact, this book leaves the reader with the impression that philosophy started with Plato and ended with Aristotle, with brief revivals by St. Thomas Aquinas and an occasional Pope. McInerny quite explicitly rejects all of "modern philosophy" (i.e. nearly all philosophy from Descartes to now) as not worth discussing, characterizing it as so many different versions of subjectivism. As a philosopher and a teacher of philosophy, I have never been so personally and professionally insulted by a book. As a philosopher himself, McInerny knows full well that what he says about modern philosophy (which for some bizarre reason he feels compelled to attribute to the pernicious influence of Martin Luther) is just simply false.
While the main thesis that we are all engaged in the philosophical enterprise is a laudable one, his treatment of philosophy is so infused with a Thomistic and papist bias that I could not recommend more strongly against reading this book or (God forbid!) adopting it for classroom use. This book is not an introduction to philosophy--it is a disguised piece of propaganda, and like all propaganda, is best kept at a safe distance.

Would you trust a film critic who thought that every film made since the end of the silent era was junk? How about a literary critic who dismissed everything published since the Victorian Era as a waste of time? If you agree with me that such critics are hidebound and parochial and best ignored, then you're going to save the time it would take to read "A Student's Guide to Philosophy."

As an introduction to philosophy for the newcomer this book is hopelessly inadequate. The author purports to believe that people interested in philosophy should get back to basics and read Plato and Aristotle. Fair enough. But then he goes on to trash virtually all philosophy from Descartes onwards, attacks Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy concerning a decision on abortion, and you start to realize that this is not your average tyro's guide to philosophy. This is a highly biased (if bigoted is not the word) Catholic tract that basically wants to claim that every knotty problem in philosophy can be solved by relying solely on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas -- as well as, presumably, doing everything the pope tells you to do.

If denial of the last four hundred years or so of philosophy is your idea of a good time, or if you're the kind of Catholic who just mindlessly follows the Pope's orders no matter how absurd or illogical (and most of the Catholics I know are much smarter than that), than this book is for you. But if you have half a brain and would like an adequate and reliable introduction to the subject of philosophy (and not just that portion of it that Thomists deem acceptable), I would try Kenny or Copleston or just about anyone else, because this book is a laughable failure (the Bibliographical Essay, written not by the author but by Joshua P. Hochschild, is pretty good, but even that does some special pleading for books written by the author).

If you're just starting out and you want to learn about philosophy you can do a lot better than this.

I just finished "A Students Guide to Philosophy" by Ralph McInerny and what a disappointment! I wish I would have checked the publishers website ([...]) before I opened this book. This book is a thinly guised attempt to pedal right wing propaganda. The tip off is section entitlked, "Fact/Value Split" where the author refers to "infamous Kennedy decision", referring to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's decision on abortion. I should have stopped reading there, but once I start a book I finish it through. The book puports to be a "Students Guide", but it is nothing of the sort. It is fraudulently trying to pass itself off as an academic book. Don't waste your time reading this trash, pick up Will Durant's "The Story of Philosophy" instead.