During the past three years, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have challenged a number of the world’s most prominent philosophers to elucidate on their favourite topics for the Philosophy Bites podcast - a punning title both a description (15 minutes for each podcast) and a puckish warning about the implications of the subject! So far, there have been more than seven million downloads.

    Twenty-five of these engaging and lively conversations - selected from more than a hundred - now find their way into print for the first time in a book which provides an introduction to, or sampler of, the whole intellectual adventure of philosophy, and also affords many valuable insights into scorching issues ranging across politics, ethics, metaphysics and mind, aesthetics, God, atheism and, of course, the meaning of life.

    It sounds daunting but, as the authors say, and prove within these pages, philosophy need not be obscure, and shouldn’t be inaccessible - nor need the communication of its ideas detract from the seriousness or complexity of its topics which, in this case, are more often than not truly ‘topical’, dealing with issues such as multiculturalism, minority rights, architecture, genetics and the definition of art.

    Most explanations of what philosophy is are controversial, especially if they are intended to be at all engaging or profound, and this is certainly borne out by a section at the beginning of this book for which 25 philosophers were asked ‘what is philosophy?’ The authors were given 25 different answers, including one simply of laughter!

    Difficulties arise partly because what has been called philosophy has changed dramatically through history, with many subjects that were originally part of it no longer being so. Perhaps the best definition and, mercifully, one of the shortest, is ‘thinking about thinking’, and this is actually proffered by one of the above-mentioned philosophers.

    Another short definition is ‘thinking that is obsessed with clarity’. Such approaches highlight the characteristic philosophical mode of reflective thought about various kinds of thinking about the world - how beliefs are formed and how knowledge is arrived at, for example.

    There’s a particular place for philosophical reflection particularly whenever a big idea - the meaning of which is somehow unclear or controversial - looms within statements which are difficult to support (or challenge), and which don’t seem to relate logically to other beliefs deemed to be on a firmer footing.

    Edmonds is a documentary maker for the BBC World Service and a research associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University, and Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy with the Open University and the author of several introductory philosophy books. A follow-up book from them will comprise interviews about great philosophers.

    There’s little doubt about the increasing appetite for a popular approach to philosophy, judging by the many slim volumes which have appeared in this area over the past decade or so.

 

 

This is an intelligent and perceptive guide to dealing with the dark side of our personalities or, in the terms of the psychologist Carl Jung, confronting one’s Shadow, upon whom Deborah Wells draws deeply, along with Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves, ancient mythology and Clarissa Estés, the American poet and Jungian psychoanalyst.

    According to Deborah, the Dark Man - the ‘man in the long black coat’ - can be ghoul or guide, and many things in between, but is far from simply being evil personified, as he is able to bring messages of reassurance, direction and hope.

    This dark spectre, known often also as Hades, Set, Pluto, the Bogeyman, Lucifer or simply Death, has always accompanied the human race, with misunderstandings and falsehoods surrounding him resulting in untold anguish and suffering. He arises from our unconscious, taking many forms, one imagining him, for example, as the onset of fear or anxiety, some indeterminate frightening or threatening presence, a tempter or a dark-mood inducer.

    A writer and teacher who lives in Yorkshire, England, Deborah considers who or what the Dark Man may be, the forms he can take, the environment in which he is found, the work he performs and the role he might have in your own life. She stresses that the Dark Man is neither abstract phantom nor fairytale demon but a powerful, living entity which is a fundamental part of us and our world, whether we regard him as an archetype, a law of nature or an old god. She wants to open our eyes to this universal phenomenon so that we can restore our ‘natural balance’ by engaging with him.

    Deborah feels sure we all have at least one ‘Dark Man’ experience to recount, but I suspect many of us have ‘Dark Woman’ encounters we could describe, too, which can be traced through to the Kali, Hecate or Medusa myths. Jung posits the Terrible Mother archetype, for instance. I, for one, can testify to this, so perhaps Deborah could write a sequel!

    However, as Clarissa Estés writes wisely in her poem Abre La Puerta, in Theatre of the Imagination, which seems to refer to such transformational encounters: ‘All strong souls first go to hell before they do the healing of the world they came here for. If we are lucky, we return to help those still trapped below.’

    In a strange way, we need the Dark Man in order to see the light.

 

Stepping up to the plate can be a walk in the park if you know your onions!

    Here in the third edition of this indispensable volume are explanations of more than 6,000 sayings, similes, proverbs and phrases - an increase of nearly 700 over the previous edition of 2004 - from contemporary English and around the English-speaking world, both modern and historical.

    It’s a fresh look at the colourful expressions – sometimes quirky, sometimes profound - that make English the rich and intriguing language that it is, and it’s based on Oxford’s language monitoring, the world’s largest dictionary research programme. Many entries include additional features that give more detailed background on the idiom in question, such as the examples above.

    Did you know that ‘flavour of the month’ originated in a marketing campaign in American ice cream parlours in the 1940s, when a particular flavour would be specially promoted for a month at a time? That ‘off the cuff’ refers to the rather messy practice of writing impromptu notes on one’s shirt cuff before speaking in public? That to be ‘taken aback’ was adopted from nautical terminology that described a ship unable to move forward because of a strong headwind pressing its sails back against the mast?

 

With the impending beatification and probable canonisation of Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-90), and Pope Benedict’s visit to the UK this September (2010), this is a timely and instructive work which draws a warts-and-all portrait of a ‘literary workaholic’, and celebrates arguably the greatest writer on modern religion in the English language.

    When Newman’s grave was excavated in 2008, with a view to his remains being transferred to a more auspicious location for public veneration, pending his possible canonisation, no human remains were found.

    After a number of substantial Newman biographies in the last century, Cornwell, an award-winning journalist and author, and an objective historian of the modern Catholic Church, offers a concise and more accessible account of the saintly but controversial scholar who was once dubbed ‘the most dangerous man in England’ by the Vatican.

    Newman’s credo was to seek and follow religious truth wherever it led, causing his conversion to Catholicism at age 44 - and his subsequent vilification by Protestants. It wasn’t until Newman explained himself in his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita. Sua, one of the great spiritual classics of modern times, that he freed himself of accusations of dishonesty.

    He had renewed the spirituality of the Church of England, and influenced the reforming spirit of the Catholic Church. One of the earliest Christian supporters of Darwin’s theory of evolution, he stressed the role of conscience over authority. A complex character who, doubtless paradoxically to some, was able to represent doctrine and dogma as well as innovation, Newman brought many new ideas to the Catholic Church.

  

 

Less than a year after publication of Colin Wilson’s Super Consciousness: the Quest for the Peak Experience, comes this work on the same subject, although, surprisingly, there is only one (indirect) mention of Wilson, the key pioneer in the field over the past four decades, and Taylor’s title even has hints of Wilson’s The War Against Sleep, of 1980, about the psychological theorist George Gurdjieff, who has no mention at all but who was crucially concerned with human “awakening”.

    We carry the evolutionary process forward and help to make the universe more conscious of itself – Jung’s “myth of meaning” – and, indeed, evolution does seem to be impelling us to wake up. It has been argued that, throughout evolution, there have been emergent properties in the brain and in consciousness with underlying biochemical explanations. It may be that such novel properties are developed in the brain at a certain stage of complexity, and that the increasing incidence of the peak experience is a demonstration of one such faculty, with the purpose of developing brain functions to a higher level.

 

The first thing I feel I must say about this book from the MP for Oldham West and Royton is that, strictly speaking, the title should be Origination of the Species, as only the final six pages approach the question, implicit in the title, of “where are we going?”

  I realise that this would not have been such a saleable title - it obviously lacks the pull of the prophetic - but Meacher is no oracle and does not offer an answer to the question other than to suggest that our salvation lies in spirituality, an “emergent property” of evolution which has been neglected. This is hardly a new idea.