Philosophy

by C.E.M. Joad

1963 British hardbound edition

Genres: Philosophy

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad was an English philosopher and broadcasting personality. He is most famous for his appearance on The Brains Trust, an extremely popular BBC Radio wartime discussion programme. He managed to popularise Philosophy and became a celebrity, before his downfall in the Train Ticket Scandal of 1948.

Reviews

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book in a book store in Italy. The name C.E.M. Joad sounded familiar but I was not sure where to put him. An antagonist of Russell, I seemed to remember, so maybe one of the British Idealists?

It turns out (according to Wikipedia) that Joad was one of the best known intellectuals (along with Russell and Shaw) of his time and the very popular host of a BBC radio show. He was fired from BBC eventually because he was travelling on a train without a ticket. And he is now so nearly forgotten that there is not even a German Wikipedia page about him. At one time he presented a paper critizising the analytic philosophy popular in Cambridge and Wittgenstein is supposed to have said: “naturally a slum landlord would object to slum clearance”.

Okay, but how is the book? It is a short general introduction to Philosophy, written in 1943. He begins by saying that philosophy is difficult, partly because philosophers are often deliberately obscure. He quotes Kant and Whitehead to prove it. And he certainly is crystal clear but the reason is that his philosophy, to say it right now, is not very deep. He also says that one should not read philosophy for more than half an hour at a time, and that one should skip chapters and only read what one is interested in and understands. To me, this seems obviously wrong. On the other hand he says that you have to know Greek and Latin, the sciences, history, poetry and everything else that is to be known in order to study philosophy. He then freely admits that he himself does not know that much, that Kant and Hegel are unreadable for him and that he is “parochial, too, in respect to my partiality for the English philosophers.”

The philosopher he really admires is Plato and he agrees with everything Plato has ever written including his theory of forms and the idea that philosophers should be kings. (He is struggling a bit here because he sees that an argument can be made that Plato is the father of fascist ideology.)

From Plato he comes to Locke and then to Berkeley who, according to him, seems to be the wisest of philosophers. So fire is not really hot it is only in you that there is heat. How the egg knows that it has to become hard when in boiling water, I do not fully understand. Okay it is not becoming really hard, you only think it is. And there is this funny argument: Because they are so far away we see the light of stars only after some months(!) and so perhaps they do not exist anymore when we see them and because they might not exist anymore they might not exist (as independent objects) at all.

Hume is not mentioned. Descartes is mentioned but only as a proponent of rationalism. What rationalism is he explains by quoting Leibniz. Unfortunately he give no source to his quotation and I doubt that Leibniz has said what Joad believes he has said.

Then there is a large section on ethics and then on the philosophy of politics. There is really not much philosophy to be found here. He talks about the social contract but mentions neither Hobbes nor Rousseau. What he does have to say is more or less the common sense view on what is right and wrong. It is easy to read and quite enjoyable even but as an introduction to philosophy almost totally useless.

So I think this is a case where a man has been forgotten for good reason. For someone interested in an introduction to philosophy I still have to recommend Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. Or Alistair Sinclair’s What is Philosophy?

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

An introductory text.