My Book Reviews

Reviewing Schizophrenia 1 An old friend of mine, and furthermore a wise old man, now long dead, often used to advise us to read widely, and he often repeated for us one of his favourite quotations: “I fear the man of a single book.” (“Hominem unius libri timeo”).  Apparently, that statement comes from St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), one of the greatest theologians and philosophers of the medieval period.  In like manner, I have always felt that we should fear those who rely on any one source for their theories, or on one theory to the exclusion of all others.  From having lived 68 years on this planet, life, with all the problems and mysteries it throws our way, is far more complex than we might at first naively believe.  As regards mental health, and the problem of psychosis in particular, mainly in its incarnation of what’s called schizophrenia , is what I would like to discuss in this post and the next several. Indeed, it can certainly not be reduced to any sin...

Writing has always entranced me. There is something magical in seeing words order themselves into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters and chapters into books.  It is an imaginative and virtual Lego, with marvellous and wondrous worlds, if not universes, conjured therefrom. Then, to be able to communicate ideas clearly or compose stories, frightening or sustaining, but always riveting, would be a marvellous and added pleasure.  This brings me to one of my favourite contemporary philosophers, Professor A.C. Grayling (b. 1949), who is a master in such virtual Lego building. He is the author of more than thirty books that are wide-ranging within the field of philosophy and indeed outside that specialist field.  He also must have written thousands of articles in newspapers on a multitude of topics.   I first came across him through reading "The Last Word" column in The Guardian.  He wrote that column for several years (1999–2002) and was a...

Sometimes it is the design of the cover of a book that draws one.   Other times, it is the book as an artefact that attracts.   Or it could be the title.   Most certainly, yes, in this case.   The title of the book I want to review today is A Brief Guide to Philosophical Classics: From Plato to Winnie the Pooh by James M. Russell (Robinson Publishers, London, 2015).      A book that throws its philosophical net as far from Plato as Winnie the Pooh, a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by the English author A. A. Milne , must surely be worth perusing.   Having seen the range of the contents, I was not long deciding that I would purchase this book to accompany my many other books on philosophy on my shelves.   For a general reader, this short book, which consists of a moderate number of pages at a finishing line of 286, provides a wide-ranging introduction to philosophical ideas both from the major philosophers of the Western Tradi...