Think

This book by Simon Blackburn is a general, broad, accessible introduction of some of the key areas in philosophy. I had read it before, but shortly before I started my undergraduate in philosophy and therefore before I started this blog - but decided to re-read it because my youngest brother is currently studying philosophy for his A-levels and I want to give it him for his birthday but also make sure that it was an appropriate text for his level.

   Blackburn writes well, as eruditely as accessibly - he never introduces jargon terms without pre-empting them in common sense language, he never presumes that his readers are familiar with any particular thinkers or concepts, etc. Anyway, throughout the bitesize-enough-but-still-meaty eight chapters of the book he deals with: knowledge, mind, free will, the self, God, reasoning, the world, and 'what to do'. Across the brief sketches of philosophical history he outlines in these chapters he does manage to convey a largely helpful picture of some of the key themes that philosophers have been wrestling with for millennia, as well as diving somewhat deeper into particular thinkers who seem to shed further insight (though if you ask me, Blackburn has a bit too much of a hard-on for Hume).

   I'm confident that this book will be helpful to my brother - and in saying such, I'm saying I would probably recommend it as an introductory text for anyone of the age of fifteen or up starting to study philosophy from scratch. One small gripe I have is that this book barely deals with ethics, that being only around half of the final chapter - but Blackburn has written a whole other book similar to this one on that topic, my copy of which I am also re-reading to see if it's worth gifting to my brother, so watch this space.