The Simplest Philosophy Introduction
A book review of “What Does It All Mean? — A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy” By Thomas Nagel
As the title implies, this is meant as a short introduction to philosophy. And although unlike most in this genre, this one is actually *very* short. It’s about 100 pages with a relatively big text size, and the language is very easy to understand, as non-technical as it could possibly get. Most would be able to read this in a couple of hours.
Philosophy is incredibly complex, and something like this may sound counter-intuitive. Yet, this is precisely what philosophy needs for anyone outside of it. It dives into fundamental problems that everyone at some point likely thought about, but it doesn’t “teach” you what a particular philosopher thought of it. It just presents the problem and some of the possible solutions. While still a bit dependent on one’s personality, I think the population at large would find most topics of philosophy quite interesting. The problem is that for most it seems impenetrable. This is exactly what Thomas Nagels tries to fight, and he did it very well.
The book has 9 main topics and all of them are incredibly general. It touches on knowledge (how can we know anything?), problems of mind (how can we know others are conscious? what’s the relationship between the physical and the mental world?), metaphysics (do we have free will or is the universe deterministic?), and others.
I was somewhat skeptical of touching on such big topics with such a short-length, but it’s surprisingly not very dumbed-down, it just doesn’t go very in-depth. But of course, that’s the point. Another problem with being introduced to philosophy is that it always feels like whatever topic you start from you don’t do it justice if you don’t give it a significant amount of depth, otherwise importance nuances are missed. This is important but creates the massive problem of spending a large amount of time and effort on a topic that someone may not like. Maybe someone would love the philosophy of ethics, but if they have to read a hundred pages or a couple one-hour lectures about ontology first, which they couldn’t give two shits about, they will likely give up and think philosophy isn’t for them. Touching things very broadly allows you to present most of the things that the field has to offer. You can always go deeper later, and if someone likes the topic, they certainly will.
I do think that presenting the history of ideas within any given field of philosophy is not only important but extremely interesting as well. This is something the book definitely misses, but again it’s a well-thought trade-off with the benefits previously mentioned. I think this book is particularly well suited for early teenagehood when many of the “big” questions and critical thinking start taking place. Yet, most will likely not find the most fun studying a chronological list of dead people. They want to think and talk about the topics themselves, which Nagels does with you.
Overall, I support his approach, and if you’re interested in philosophy and completely new to the topic, this is a solid pick for a very general overview of most of the topics in philosophy. If you find something you like, you can either get a bigger introduction to philosophy or go straight to a specific field you found interesting.
