The "problems" range from logic puzzles and paradoxes, to optical
illusions, to ethical puzzles, to basic problems of knowledge. All are
intended to illustrate some part of the domain of philosophy, I guess,
and most are at least a little interesting. But in the end I was left
wondering just what to make of it all.
I'm probably not alone in thinking that philosophy is pretty much done
as a separate discipline, having been overtaken by science and
mathematics, with not much left to add to add to our understanding of
either the world or ourselves. Even ethics, the last outpost of
philosophy, is being studied now as a product of evolution. It's not
obvious that a scientific account of ethics is capable of providing
the sort of answers we typically expect when thinking about ethical
problems - but it' not clear that 2500 years of philosophy has done
much for us in this area, either.
But for now philosophy hangs on in the role of thinking about other
disciplines; thinking about the foundations of the disciplines that
have stolen philosophy's thunder. So, for example, Wittgenstein's
"Foundations of Mathematics" takes a deep look at the nature of
mathematical proof, especially proofs that involve limits or notions
of infinity. All very interesting - but no mathematician will learn
anything from it, or do anything differently as a result of having
read it.
And so it has also been with the philosophy of science, where
philosophy has mostly limited itself to a descriptive role. Think, for
example, of Karl Popper's "The Logic of Scientific Discovery": an
excellent description of scientific method as it had already
evolved. This, at least, was an improvement over all previous
philosophical attempts to understand how science ought to be done.
And so it goes. We might be tempted to think that epistemology is an
area that philosophy can help with. After all, the question of what we
can know and how we can know it is something that philosophers have
thought about for millenia. Surely they've come up with something
useful in all that time. Well, maybe. But as late as the 1940s one of
the most eminent philosophers of modern times was claiming that most
such epistemelogical problems were mere failures to use language in a
proper way!
So, by all means buy and read this book. It's interesting, mostly, and
thought provoking occasionally. But don't expect any eureka moments or
deep insights into the workings of the world or of your own mind. For
that, study physics, or neurobiology.