Uncommon Sense

The Strangest Ideas from the Smartest Philosophers

By (author) Andrew Pessin

Publication date:

03 February 2015

Length of book:

228 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442216099

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)!

Andrew Pessin's Uncommon Sense is an uncommonly good introduction to philosophy, unpretentious in its style, and unerring in its sense of humor. It will provide both entertainment and insight to those seeking wisdom from philosophy's most incredible theories. As a philosophical tour guide for the uninitiated, Pessin is unbeatable.