Uncommon Sense

The Strangest Ideas from the Smartest Philosophers

By (author) Andrew Pessin

Publication date:

19 June 2012

Length of book:

234 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442216082

In Uncommon Sense, Andrew Pessin leads us on an entertaining tour of philosophy, explaining the pivotal moments when the greatest minds solved some of the knottiest conundrums—by asserting some very strange things. But the great philosophers don’t merely make unusual claims, they offer powerful arguments for those claims that you can’t easily dismiss. And these arguments suggest that the world is much stranger than you could have imagined:

You neither will, nor won't, do certain things in the future, like wear your blue shirt tomorrow.
But your blue shirt isn't really blue, because colors don’t exist in physical objects; they’re only in your mind.
Time is an illusion.
Your thoughts are not inside your head.
Everything you believe about morality is false.
Animals don’t have minds.
There is no physical world at all.

In eighteen lively, intelligent chapters, spanning the ancient Greeks and contemporary thinkers, Pessin examines the most unusual ideas, how they have influenced the course of Western thought, and why, despite being so odd, they just might be correct. Here is popular philosophy at its finest, sure to entertain as it enlightens.

Introduction: “Stop Making Sense”
Chapter 1: Plato / More Than What Meets the Eye
Chapter 2: Aristotle / Neither You Will Nor You Won’t
Chapter 3: Augustine / Forced to Be Free
Chapter 4: Anselm / God is Not Just a Good Idea
Chapter 5: Maimonides / Keeps Going, and Going, and Going … Or Not?
Chapter 6: Thomas Aquinas / God Has Not Been on Vacation Since the Original Creation
Chapter 7: René Descartes / “A Monstrous Thesis”
Chapter 8: John Locke / True Colors
Chapter 9: Nicolas Malebranche / On Honoring Leeks and Vegetables
Chapter 10: G. W. Leibniz / Synchronicity
Chapter 11: George Berkeley / To Be Is to Perceive, or Be Perceived
Chapter 12: David Hume / Stercus Accidit
Chapter 13: Friedrich Nietzsche / Philosopher, Psychologist—Antichrist?
Chapter 14: John McTaggart / Time Does Not Fly Even When You’re Having Fun
Chapter 15: Ludwig Wittgenstein / The Voice In My Head is Speaking Nonsense
Chapter 16: Hilary Putnam / Thinking Outside the (Cranial) Box
Chapter 17: David Lewis / The Incredulous Stare
Chapter 18: Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers / Mind and Matter, Together Again at Last (Sort of)!

A key to understanding this book is furnished by the author's claim that 'common sense is what we believe about things when we haven't given them much thought.' So Pessin (Connecticut College) turns to what he calls strange claims of philosophers to introduce such topics as free will, God, morality, minds, and reality. The usual names appear--Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Maimonides, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, and Hume. Also featured are Malebranche and Leibniz on the question of mind-body interaction, Berkeley on the nature of the external world, and Nietzsche's program for rewriting the grounds of morality. Pessin also includes contemporary philosophers John McTaggart on time, Wittgenstein on private language, Hilary Putnam on the nature of thinking, and David Lewis on possible worlds theory. The last of 18 chapters considers the view of Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers that something like mind permeates all reality. The chapters are short, the writing clear, and the tone entertaining. Each chapter contains primary and secondary sources, and the book has a good index. Looking for a book to give to someone to create interest in philosophy? This is it. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-level undergraduates; general readers.