This Is Philosophy: An Introduction 1st Edition

thanks

I assign this text to the students of my Introduction to Philosophy course, a general education course populated almost entirely by non-majors. I follow the chapter order and find that it works quite well, although it is apparent that a course could deviate from that order without difficulty. The supplementary material - multiple-choice questions and powerpoint slides - is useful in its own right, and often serves as an inspiration for writing my own questions and slides. Students seem to have an easy time following the main ideas and arguments in the text, which strike me as balanced and comprehensive.

I've been teaching a version of introduction to philosophy to undergraduates for 20 years now, and I've used, and looked at, a lot of textbooks. This is Philosophy: An Introduction is the best that I've found so far

Start with its non-philosophical advantages: it's inexpensive, succinct (yet covers lots of ground), and it's written in a voice that's not only comprehensible but also interesting to an undergraduate who's taking his/her first course in philosophy (which is my general audience).

Additionally, the book contains excellent bibliographies at the ends of the chapters, and tons of relevant links that are directly accessible if you have the e-version of the book, and easy to look up if you don't. They range from entertaining (and spot-on) pop culture links (Star Trek, The Simpsons, Jeopardy!) to video links (for example, demonstrations of Libet's experiments) to entire philosophical texts in the public domain. And the book's index is thorough and useful -- another rarity these days.

But what about the philosophy? I can't comment on the Ethics chapters, as I don't use those in my intro courses (we have a separate ethics course where I teach). But the rest of the book does exactly what an introductory text (arranged topically) is supposed to do -- which is to introduce readers to the big philosophical questions and give them a sense of the playing field around each of them. Hales includes the essentials laid out in well-ordered chapters, often divided into "arguments for" and "arguments against" (followed by objections and responses). For example, the chapter on God is divided (after a discussion on faith) into "why there is a God" and "why there is no God" sections, with the former including discussions of the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments in addition to Pascal's Wager (too often excluded from intro texts, for some reason), and the latter including the problem of evil and an argument from religious pluralism (again, something that's often not included in intro texts). Along the way Hales explains how you can, at least sometimes "prove a negative", which is a useful point to make, given how cemented the contrary view has become.

Critics of Hales' section on God seem to me to miss the point of an introductory text, which is to introduce as opposed to providing an exhaustive discussion of everything ever said on the subject. Providing a broad overview of arguments that have gone on for centuries always leaves one open to "straw man" type objections, but Hales captures the essential features of these arguments while providing plenty of opportunity for discussion and disagreement. Furthermore, Hales constantly reminds readers that there's a lot more out there on these topics -- and shows them where to find it! For example, the first sentence of his conclusion on the God chapter says: "while the pros and cons of the most prominent arguments concerning the existence of God have been discussed in the present chapter, there are still many theistic and atheistic arguments out there" -- and he briefly summarizes a few of those and provides links for following them up.

Especially noteworthy is Hales' section on knowledge/epistemology. This is the most challenging topic for introductory texts, I've found, and Hales' treatment of it is exemplary. Rather than organize the entire chapter around skepticism, which is a common strategy, Hales begins with discussions of truth and evidence -- subjects that students need to consider independently of the skeptical challenge. Once he has considered questions about what counts as evidence and how much of it we need, he moves on to the nature of knowledge and skeptical issues.

Any concise introductory text is going to leave some things out that individual instructors would like to see included. In the past, this has often led me to use multiple texts, or a text and a reader. With Hales' book, however, such omissions are surprisingly rare; and, where they do occur, his incorporation of readily available external resources has made the gaps easy to fill.

In short, I highly recommend Hales' book for introductory courses and will continue to use it for the foreseeable future.

an ok book. not great not bad. needed this book for class. would buy used and on the cheap. hope this helps

I adopted this text for my summer Intro to Philosophy course and it worked quite well. As a professor, I particularly appreciate that the chapters are largely self-contained; there's nothing about the ordering of the chapters that prevents you from teaching them out of order as fits your needs. That's what I did: we started with the chapter on knowledge, then moved to God, then to Ethics.

The students openly approved of the text, because it was easily readable, used straightforward examples, and (more pragmatically) because it was inexpensive.

This might sound like a back-handed compliment, but it's not: despite what the other reviewers claim, there is nothing out of the mainstream in this book. This is not "just Hales' opinions." The book covers all the important basic views in (analytic) philosophy, discusses all the major objections in an even-handed way, and gives the reader a fair sense of what contemporary analytic philosophy looks like at the introductory level.

The supplementary materials are OK, but they could be better. The bank of test questions supplied to professors is relatively small and the questions are (in my opinion) much too easy. But, it's available as an e-book which makes the links in the references a very handy resource (and makes the book even cheaper).

All in all, it's a fine text, especially for classes in a quarter system, or where you expect few students will continue on to be majors. It's affordable and well written for a target audience of non-majors with no prior exposure to philosophy.