VoidPhil

In All Things Shining, philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly discuss the search for meaning in our secular world. While they do a decent job of cataloging earlier belief systems and explaining their current disuse, they do a poor job of finding modern alternatives. Hubert Dreyfus was a fairly well-known and influential philosopher. His primary areas of expertise were the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, as well as 20th century French and German philosophy, particularly existentialism.

John Mackie's seminal 1977 work is essential reading for any student of ethics. In this work, Mackie explicates an argument from queerness against the existence of objective moral facts. Mackie also examines the effects of this revelation on the status of some established moral systems and makes recommendations for proceeding with moral investigation. Mackie opens the book bluntly with the statement “There are no objective values.” This first sentence is indicative of Mackie's style throughout the book.

Reza Negarestani's only novel is a work unto itself. Negarestani has written something truly weird here, a blending of the genres of horror, fiction, and philosophy so dense and confounding that it leaves one with the impression that you can't have understood it properly. The influence of Deleuze and Guattari is obvious, with some chapter names playing on Deleuzian terms, and at least one chapter beginning with a quote from A Thousand Plateaus.

Sue Prideaux's biography of Nietzsche presents a fascinating and well-researched picture of the great philosopher. Prideaux strikes the right balance of focus on both Nietzsche's life and work, and does an excellent job of humanizing Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a philosopher for whom biography is particularly important (ironically he claimed that all philosophy was biography) and this is an excellent resource for learning about his life and philosophy. Prideaux's book provides a sketch of Nietzsche's life, and does a very good job of not focusing overly much on any particular portion of his life.

This book, written by Michael Inwood, is my first interaction with the “A Very Short Introduction” series of books. My initial reaction is impressed, as this is exactly the sort of book I was looking for in an introduction. The book manages to give a very serious, very in depth overview of Heidegger's thought. I appreciated that the book mainly ignored Heidegger's biography, a problem I've had with other introductory books, and tended to err on the side of being overly academic and overly in depth on issues, rather than skipping over them.