Grayling - Ideas that matter: the concepts that shape the 21st century

Table of Contents

Anthony Grayling, philosopher, has constructed a personal dictionary...inspirational...casually brilliant...a series of brilliant, informative essays...provocative, forceful and informative.

Sunday Herald (Glasgow)

If there is any such person in Britain today as The Thinking Man, it is A.C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck. He provides generous help for the ethically challenged, the philosophically perplexed, and the culturally confused.

Times (London)

[Graylings] very range (Cloning to Creationism, Quantum Mechanics to Religion, Logic to String Theory) reflects the conviction that only through knowledge, investigation, and thoughtusing ones own understanding and pursued without coercioncan human beings fulfill their individual potential.

Literary Review (London)

Renowned philosopher A. C. Grayling provides a personal dictionary of the ideas that will shape our world in the decades to come.

[Ideas that Matter represents] an attempt to explain the broad intellectual background of the 21st century by offering mini-discourses on very large concepts such as history, religion, truth, and war, among other subjects. That Grayling is able to offer pleasantly readable accounts of these immense topics in one or two pages is a testament to his skill as a writer for wide audiences.

A handy addition to many bookshelveswritten clearly and elegantly out of a vast reservoir of knowledge.

The Weekend Australian (Sydney)

Graylings learning is remarkable: he covers, among many other topics, string theory, capitalism, and Orthodox Christianity. Even readers with different points of view will benefit from Graylings clear accounts of his topics. He is especially good at explaining clearly difficult ideas, e.g., the standard model of physics; the entries on philosophical topics are particularly well done. All readers interested in the issues discussedand who isnt?will gain much from this book.

Grayling winnows a universe of ideas, ideologies, and philosophies into a personal dictionary for understanding the new century.... [His] dictionary will appeal to readers looking for a perspective of the 21st centurys big ideas as seen from the ivory tower.

As always, Grayling delights in a bit of polemic while expressing himself with the crispest of prose; his sharpest jabs are reserved for the irrational aspects of religion. But, like most of his books, this account is designed to be more thought-provoking than utterly authoritative. It succeeds.

For non-specialists, Graylingpresents a unique and accessible personal dictionary that introduces the ideas that have shaped the twenty-first century.

What drives the modern world? How are our ideas developed? Heavy matter is given a relatively light touch by writer and philosophy lecturer Grayling. This is a kind of handbook for the 21st century, tackling the main schools of thought and helping us swim with them rather than be drowned by intellectualism.

Huddersfield Daily Examiner (West Yorkshire)

Grayling is almost without peer as a serious academic who is also serious about what the French call haute vulgarization, the rendering of complex and important ideas in a way that the general reader can understand. This book is no dilettantes feast of intellectual sushi. Each entry is given its five or six pages of carefully crafted exegesis, and each one bears the Grayling hallmarks of erudition lightly worn, and words that chime like grace notes in their invitation to understanding. Deep, unexamined ideas are probably our greatest impediment to effective agency and wise choice. The unexpected entries in Graylings book may well be those that will help us most.

Canberra Times (Canberra)

[A] provocative book which will engage, and at times outrage, most thoughtful readers. There is much to enjoy here, much with which to argue, and for most readers, at least some things from which to learn.

The Refutation of Scepticism
Berkeley: The Central Arguments
The Long March to the Fourth of June (as Li Xiao Jun)
Wittgenstein
China: A Literary Companion (with S. Whitfield)
Moral Values
An Introduction to Philosophical Logic
Russell
The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt
The Meaning of Things
The Reason of Things
What is Good? The Search for the Best Way to Live
The Heart of Things
Descartes
The Form of Things
In Freedoms Name
Among the Dead Cities
On Religion (with Mick Gordon)
Against All Gods
Truth, Meaning and Realism
Towards the Light
The Choice of Hercules
Scepticism and the Possibility of Knowledge

Robert Herrick: Lyrics of Love and Desire
Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject
Philosophy: Further Through the Subject
The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy
Arthur Schopenhauer: The Art of Always Being Right

In the pages to follow I offer a personal dictionary of ideas that have a bearing on an understanding of our world as the twenty-first century unfolds. Some of the ideas are contemporary, some are historical ideas which in more and less subtle ways continue to operate, or in some cases should continue to operate, in the background of the thought and institutions that shape us now. This is a necessarily limited selection, made partly according to the authors interests but chiefly for their intrinsic significance. The overriding criterion for which ideas to include turned on whether knowing about them would enhance an informed receptivity to the events, movements and possibilities of the recent past and its offspring, our time.

Another major motive for giving an overview of the ideas explained here is that the gap described by C.P. Snow in his famous Rede Lecture of 1959, The Two Cultures, seems to have become almost impossibly wide, making more urgent the need in todays world for a greater degree of literacy in both scientific and cultural respects. The gap of which Snow spoke is that between science and literary culture, but it should more properly and broadly be identified as a gap between the natural and social sciences, on one hand, and the humanities and literary culture on the other. As science has become increasingly more specialized and complex, so the public mind in general has become increasingly less acquainted with it, and therefore correspondingly less able to participate in informed conversations about the implications, applications, promises, possibilities and periodic risks of science. Moreover, attitudes to science on the part of politicians and public servants educated in the humanities have not always been as informed and responsive as the scientific community itself would like, so here too more insight is desirable.

But professionals in the sciences do well to be alert to ideas in philosophical, political and social thought too, so that the wider implications of their own work can be present to them as they do it. Of course the best scientists always are aware in this way; the example of some of the participants in the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, engaged in the construction of the atom bomb, is striking. Much more of this is desirable, and it comes from an appropriate version of the humanistic literacy that would complement and match scientific literacy.