Reviews for Our only star and compass

The average rating for Our only star and compass based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-27 00:00:00 Samantha Schwartz As is usually the case with Simmons, this is a very clearly written and thoughtful book. In it, he carefully lays out his understanding of Locke's state of nature, the conditions by which political associations can (for Locke) be made, the conditions under which we can claim that political authorities have gone too far, and what this interpretation would mean with respect to our attitudes towards government. (spoiler alert: Simmons is a philosophical anarchist) This book led me to understand many of Locke's positions in a different and very interesting light. I'm not a Locke scholar, so I don't know how Simmons' analysis holds up to his rivals'. To his credit, Simmons quite often points out and very briefly explains contrasting positions in footnotes. I would expect that Locke scholars would find this style very useful when assessing Simmons' arguments. That said, the frequent and at times very long footnotes do make the text more disjointed for readers like me. Worse yet, the footnotes are neither all explanatory, nor all mere references - the mix of the two left me annoyed at feeling as though I had to break my concentration in order to look down, only to see a series of authors and page numbers. Some of the longer footnotes surely could have been integrated within the text itself. But seriously, a really good book.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-09 00:00:00 John Sweeney Helpful tool for the class I was taking