Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language and Linguistics (Concise Encyclopedias of Lan... Book

Roger Scruton’s Modern Philosophy is, in a strange way, the funniest work of serious philosophical commentary I’ve ever read. This survey is organized thematically, so the chapters have headings like Soul, Mind, Time, Science, God, Death, etc. That is one part of the book’s humor. With almost comical erudition, Scruton just keeps coming with insights on every painfully complex issue confronted by philosophers from Descartes to Rorty. It’s astounding that at some point he doesn’t gag and croak on his own brilliance.

Through 500 pages of exposition he simply never yields! Is God possible or impossible? Is time real or an illusion? How did Kant deal with Hume’s Law? (How did Hume deal with Hume’s Law?) Why is it impossible to superimpose a left hand on a right hand even in four-dimensional space? (What is four-dimensional space?) Why is it unreasonable to fear death and doubt immortality?

The indefatigable Scruton sifts through thousands of arguments on the finer points of freedom, free will, and “the” will…the finite and the infinite…process and becoming…. There’s an inherent intellectual suspense in this tome, deriving from its chapter by chapter virtuosity. What is process? What is becoming? What is a number? Why isn’t zero a number? What is now since now is not the same now as it was when I began typing this sentence and you began reading it?

Scruton’s more easily appreciated humor—and more intentional—emerges when he writes about the likes of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Sartre, etc. He freely despises these “Continental” rogues and impostors. Heidegger gets battered the worst as a kind of mad German mystic. The problem with the others, running from existentialism through deconstructionism, is that their devious, busy little minds worked very, very hard to undermine humanity’s faith in all previous thought, institutions, and the possibility of just, collective human cooperation and mutual understanding.

“Nothingness, [Sartre] tells us, lies coiled in the heart of Being, like a worm.” Dear me! And interpretation, says Nietzsche, godfather to the deconstructionists, is a function of power, not truth. The text therefore, any text, says Derrida, is a tissue of the reader’s imagination, not the author’s.

Let’s call this book laborious but not labored fun, a steep hike through the hills of what you think but don’t know why you think it.

Scruton is the author, despite Derrida’s views, of fifty books. Obviously, he’s a little mad himself, never sleeps, corresponds with everyone about everything, reads every philosophical journal at the speed of light, and on more than one occasion enjoys expressing solemn awe at the brilliance of Aristotle, Kant, and the Lawful Hume.