Nicholas Fearn’s book is a concise and entertaining attempt to place the skills of philosophy at our fingertips, to bring the art of thinking like a philosopher out of the lecture hall and back into the public domain. Each of the 25 pithy chapters presents a philosopher and the philosophical “tool” that they are credited with discovering. Zeno and the Tortoise t is best read in fits and starts, allowing each concept to tease the mind and reveal some of the inconsistencies in our beliefs. As Fearn points out at the end of the chapter on “Hume’s Fork: How to skewer nonsense”: “the foundations of our expectations is found in habit rather than reason.”
Apart from giving some tragi-comic anecdotes about the philosophers’ lives, Fearn applies many of these philosophical devices to modern life. That most of the examples are taken from the taboo subjects of sex, politics and religion perhaps reveals one of the hallmarks of philosophy: the way it delves into subjects that are usually avoided.
Philosophical arguments are never-ending, not because agreement cannot be reached, but because to philosophise is to inquire. The more we come to know, the more we become aware of the vastness of what we do not know; each answer brings forth a multitude of other questions. Philosophy and its tools are not locks but keys, as Fearn emphasises, steering well clear of its dogmatic, indoctrinating aspect. If philosophers are prone to fall into wells or get stuck deep in mud (as Thales and Hume did), it is perhaps a poetic remainder that in the end, a philosophical system is simply a sequence of thoughts that has entrenched itself and within which one is prone to get bogged. More often than not, the best that survives of a philosopher is not their scheme of things but the method that they employed to arrive at their conclusions, and if this proves to be erroneous it is either because they did not use their own tools with dexterity and familiarity (a privilege often reserved for later generations), or they were too intent on proving a point and failed to notice just how powerful the tools were.
This book does lose some of its momentum with modern philosophers. In part, this is due to the history of philosophy itself: in classical times the concept of a pure and ultimate truth was never brought into question and the tools employed for its search are relatively easy to isolate. If to the ancient Greeks there was only one culture, and all the rest were barbarians, then there could be only one truth or ethical principle, and that was a Greek one. Such an approach today would smack of narrow-mindedness to say the least.
With the later philosophers also comes the question of interpretation, an aspect that is less evident with the classical philosophers where centuries of study and debate have resulted in a standardized point of view. Fearn’s reading of Nietzsche, for example, fails to give any clear entry-point into Nietzsche’s approach and use of his “hammer”, which, incidentally, was aimed at the dismantling of the self and collapse of the absolute. Although Fearn clearly appreciates and recognized Nietzsche’s genius, his focus on the elitism and final madness of the philosopher obscures rather than reveals how to wield the hammer.
The final chapter on Derrida exposes the plight of modern philosophy. A philosophical amateur reading Derrida might well say that it is a load of bunk, and most academics would love to agree, save that they would have to admit that it is clever bunk. One cannot help but feel that Fearn has included him not for any insight on the method, but because he simply had to address the vogue of this French philosopher. In the list of further reading, no text by Derrida is recommended; indeed, Fearn has to admit that Derrida “will be unintelligible even to most readers with a grounding in philosophy”.
It is droll to end a book on how to think like a philosopher with a philosopher whose intent is to undermine the notion of philosophical methods and approaches. None of this stuff, Derrida claims, is to be taken literally or too seriously, something that will puzzle most philosophy graduates like Fearn. Nevertheless, whether there is or isn’t any method in Derrida’s madness, playing the philosophical game can be exhilarating and Zeno and the Tortoise is a very helpful manual to the obstacle course. And who knows, while making your mind more flexible through mental gymnastics you might even stumble into ultimate truth.
