Our tally of philosophers to feature in the series was deliberately eclectic. We had, of course, to include theindisputably great names, whose canon is uncontested: Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley andHume have to be seeded players in any general introduction. However, we also wanted to include thosesuch as Alan Turing and Karl Marx who might, at first sight, seem improbable selections.In general, what distinguishes our contributors from those who figure in a hundred encyclopaedias andgeneral summaries is their determination to engage the reader by emphasising just one - and not the mostobvious - aspect of their subject's thought. David Berman, for example, chose to focus on Berkeley's interestin scientific experimental method. This not only liberated him from plodding through the well-worn argumentsfor and against Berkeley's Absolute Idealism; it also enabled him to display the philosopher in a fresh light.What is true of Berman on Berkeley is, we believe, true of the other essays in the collection: philosophersare treated as proponents of ideas which retain their vitality, not as the sources of antiquated curiosities.If Alan Turing's work is little known to most academic philosophers, its importance is established by AndrewHodges' masterly introduction to his ideas on artificial intelligence. Turing not only laid the foundations of thecomputer-based technology which will dominate the world in the next century, he also had significant thingsto say on issues relating to the philosophy of mind. As a somewhat tart counter to Hodges' advocacy ofTuring's ideas, Peter Hacker reminds us, with cool eloquence, of Wittgenstein's dismissal of the notion ofthoughtful machines. He takes this view not because it is false to ascribe thought to machines, but becauseit is meaningless. 'Thinking, ' Hacker reminds us, 'is a phenomenon of life. ' Wittgenstein's view was that,while we need not fear that machines will out-think us, 'we might well fear that they will lead us to cease tothink for ourselves. 'Contrasting views of this kind are abrasive reminders that great philosophers, whatever their genius, rarelyprovide definitive answers to problems. They are more likely to stimulate a continuation, perhaps arefinement, of the eternal debates. Nietzsche once said, 'you say there can be no argument about matters oftaste? All life is an argument about matters of taste!' Logic, it may seem, it not a matter of taste, but by whichlogic to read the world is finally a question as much of selection as of inevitability.The same lesson can be learned from Ray Monk's concise explanation of Russell's philosophy ofmathematics. In one way, Monk's is a sorry tale of disappointed hopes (for ultimate certainties), but seen inanother way, it clarifies some of the deepest reflections of our time on the nature of mathematics. In thisdepartment, as in many others, Russell's achievement was not in providing answers but in articulating, moreprecisely and more elegantly than before, not only where the difficulties lay but also what kind of issues theyraised.The inclusion of Karl Marx may seem provocative. No one denies the great influence that Marx had on thepolitics of his time, and ours, but many could, and most do, refuse him any importance as a pure, and moral,philosopher. Through concentrating on Marx's views on freedom, Terry Eagleton can maintain that weshould regard Marx's uncertain place in the philosophical register as evidence less of his inadequacies thanof a systematic deficiency in traditional attitudes to the subject.Martin Heidegger has often been regarded by conventional philosophers (especially on this side of theChannel) with something of the same suspicion as Marx. Heidegger's key work, Being and Time, has beendenounced as more or less unintelligible. Jonathan Ree's exposition is both elegant and unambiguous; itrenders Heidegger's masterpiece accessible without denying its knotty idiosyncrasy.Frederic Raphael's account, and partial endorsement, of Karl Popper's assault on philosophical historicismcould be said to stand to Eagleton on Marx, and Ree on Heidegger, as Hacker's Wittgenstein does toHodges' Turing. 'Compare and contrast', as the examiners used so often to require, is an enduring and vitalhabit in human thought. No one can believe without contradiction everything that is said in this anthology.What more salutary introduction could there be to philosophy's endless, and sometimes all too human,search for the truth, or truths?Ray Monk Frederic Raphael-------------------------Philosophy's Martyr: Socrates
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