Philosophy professor

In the Critics this week

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 08:04 AM PST

Jonathan Derbyshire on accessible philosophy, Lucy Eyre on Socrates and Raymond Tallis on the science of consciousness.

The Critics section of this week's New Statesman boasts a philosophy special. NS culture editor Jonathan Derbyshire assesses the development of popular philosophy and the growing number of "original but accessible books that have impressed a readership beyond the seminar room." Though academics have long held "professional anxieties about the perils of popularisation", it seems that many are "realising that rigour and accessibility need not be mutually exclusive".

Jonathan Ree is disappointed with John Gray's The Immortalisation Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, which investigates "two attempts to salvage a hope of immortality from the devastation wreaked by Darwin." Although "its range is admirably wide", it unfortunately "reads like a book with attention deficit disorder", and leaves the reader "likely to be wearied by his relentless tone of worldly sarcasm" and "jaded cynicism."

Meanwhile, Lesley Chamberlain discusses When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing With Me? Montaigne and Being in Touch With Life by Saul Frampton - the French Renaissance writer gives Frampton a "model for the trust we need in order to find our way to 'agreement, tolerance and hence truth.'"

Two books that focus on "neuroscientific attempts to capture human consciousness and human nature" are reviewed by Raymond Tallis - Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey and Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio. But despite the "ingenuity and erudition of the authors", both titles "serve only to illustrate the shortcomings" of the attempt to explain consciousness in wholly material terms.

Cambridge philosophy professor Simon Blackburn surveys Charles Taylor's Dilemmas and Connections and notes that "human shortcomings are a presence that stalks these essays". From Taylor's "Olympian standpoint" human improvement is "invisible" - a not entirely persuasive view for a "moderately cheerful pragmatist" such as Blackburn. Lucy Eyre explains why her novel If Minds Had Toes invokes "the spirit of Socrates", hoping to "spread his message that the unexamined life is not worth living."

Elsewhere, Ryan Gilbey finds Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions to be a "complicated tapestry" which prizes "shimmering cinematography" over characterisation. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's latest film, Paul, an "alien-buddy-road movie", is "scrappy and eager to please". Rachel Cooke gives her verdict on ITV drama Marchlands, a "cosy, old-fashioned and peculiarly British" ghost story which offers plenty of "supernatural silliness." Susan Hubbard is impressed by The Tate's Susan Hiller exhibition, which creates a "powerful argument" for the artist's status, and Anthonia Quirke tuned into Stuart Maconie's The Art of Breaking Apart on Radio 4, finding it to be a grim affair. And finally, Will Self thinks about mobs.