OUP
ISBN 978-0-19-968156-3

Skeptics’ interest in marine biology may often not extend much beyond imaginary sea monsters, but dolphins are of course iconic beings for New Wage enthusiasts. These creatures often seem to show signs of near-human intelligence, as do dolphins.

The book’s sub-title could be slightly expanded to include another interesting mammal, John C. Lilly, the dolphins’ chief land-based representative from the 1950s to the 80s. He it was who propounded an exciting set of ideas and claims about cetacean communication and consciousness that have helped to inspire many efforts to protect and conserve whales and dolphins.

To address the intriguing question of just how smart dolphins really are, Gregg guides our cognitive dinghies through the choppy waters of animal intelligence and the nature of natural language, navigating through neuroscience and skirting the reefs of philosophy of mind. In doing so, he provides an excellent case study of critical thinking that will warm the cockles of any skeptic, noting at the outset that,

“there are probably more weird ideas about dolphins swimming in cyberspace than there are dolphins swimming in the sea.”

Gregg’s odyssey teems with insights and updates. Dive in!

Paul Taylor

OUP, ISBN 10: 0199576327

Although the number of angels that can stand on the head of a pin may not yet have been verified, we have here twenty-five philosophers who will fit in your pocket, in this handy guide to the state of the art.

A fair amount of ground is covered too, in five regions: ethics; politics; metaphysics and mind; aesthetics; God, atheism and the meaning of life. The groupings seem odd in places: talk of gods is surely metaphysical, and evil is discussed here rather than under ethics, but it’s a start, and there’s lots to do.

The first job, of course, is to sort out what philosophy is, before we begin any adventures in the above regions. We have a harvest of twenty-five responses to that question, so we can get a good overview and soon be on our way. However, if these respondents were twenty-five cooks preparing lunchboxes for our expedition into the unknown, there would be some bitterly disappointed diners come lunchtime.

Three of our helpers just laugh, without offering anything. Many others, like McCabe (“thinking about thinking”), Bradley (“critical reflection on anything you care to be interested in”) and Neill (“thinking that is obsessed with clarity”) fail to distinguish philosophy from, say, psychology, law, art criticism or mathematics. Monk opines that “philosophy is the attempt to understand ourelves and the world”, as if biologists, psychologists and poets weren’t also working on that.

Ready or not, here we go.

Savulescu considers repugnance and morality, and reckons that sex with animals is a waste of time. Blackburn argues that moral relativism is fatally unable to reckon with real moral conflict. Singer raises awkward questions about animals, personhood and suffering. Sandel pushes philosophy out onto the sports arena. Nehamas separates friendship from morality. Appiah argues that cultural differences are best tackled from a cosmopolitian stance. Fricker brings ethics and enquiry together in value-driven epistemology. Phillips advocates multiculturalism without stereotypes. Kymlicka discusses minority rights in respect of new collective identity claims. Brown has problems with tolerance. Moore grapples with infinity. Papineau suggests that approximate truth is good enough for scientific realism. Stroud invites us to feel the force of (philosophical) skepticism. Meller figures that time is tenseless, tense being a relation between a person and an event. Crane points to the confusion in our thinking about consciousness. Williamson clarifies the logic of vagueness. Maltravers demands better reasoning in the art world (good luck!). De Botton, being a novelist, is invited to talk about what he likes in architecture. Smith refreshes the palate with a discussion of taste and judgment in relation to wine. Neill says we can resolve the paradox of tragedy by seeing it as bringing insight rather than pleasure. Cupitt is presumably in the book to remind us that theology is not philosophy. Cottingham seems unable to lead a meaningful life without yearning for spirituality. Law points out the utter unreasonableness of theism given the colossal amount of suffering in the world endured by us and other species, irrespective of human actions. Ward opines that arguments from experience can prop up Eastern idealism. Grayling reminds us of the feebleness of agnosticism, given the blatant improbability of supernatural entities. His suggestion that religions should embrace secularism for their own political survival presupposes more rationality than may be available.

All in all, plenty to bite into, preferably with the help of a bottle of Smith’s wine.

Paul Taylor

Prometheus Books, ISBN 978-1-61614-483-8

Swimming against the toxic tide of baseless “self-help” books, DiSalvo offers us a “science-help” book, and a very generous offering it is, too. His metaphor of the “happy brain” refers to our evolved tendencies to avoid loss, reduce risk and avert harm, valuable predispositions which can be triggered in inappropriate ways in many everyday contexts. He suggests ways that we can counteract these leanings, once we recognise that they are there.

Central to this mental machinery is the brain’s homeostasis, experienced as unease or anxiety in the face of ambiguities or direct challenges to the schemata we use for thinking and navigating our way through life. Reducing this unease in the face of awkward new information can take the form of ignoring, blocking or belittling the data in question.

Familiar stuff, no doubt, to skeptics. What distinguishes this book is the effort DiSalvo has put in to make his book useful: to make the insights of research practicable. One of the chapters is a toolbox of usable knowledge, in the form of a compilation of fifty practical suggestions, rules and hints. He also provides an annotated bibliography and list of online resources. There is, of course, a proper index, something that Pan Books, the publisher of Richard Wiseman’s comparable 59 Seconds, lamentably failed to provide.

Among the recommendations are: make goals tangible and measurable; become savvy about framing; make checklists and use them; be on the lookout for regret manipulation; practise for the purpose.

Of particular interest is the idea that “your brain is not only in your head”, or, as DiSalvo refers to it, the theory of embodied cognition. Twenty-odd years ago, Stephen Priest, in Theories of the Mind, described the empiricist theory of the mind as being “the identification of the brain with that which engages in the activity of thinking”. DiSalvo follows this kind of anti-dualist line, saying that the mind is “what our nervous system does”, but reports that the theory of embodied cognition extends this conception beyond what we might normally conceive as thinking. This has also been explored philosophically by Mark Rowlands, in Externalism and other books, and helps further the project of constructing an expanded vision of how humans think and feel, and how we can get beyond antique notions of “the mind”.

Packed with fascinating insights and engagingly written, this book is warmly recommended.

Paul Taylor

Prometheus Books, ISBN 978-1-61614-397-8

Given the morass of tree-wasting texts in the figmentalist section of any bookshop, an addition to the skeptical counter-attack is welcome a priori. DiCarlo hails from Canada, where he lectures on philosophy, and here he has gathered his thoughts on skeptical issues to produce a handbook for those new to critical thinking. Books on critical thinking are not new, however, and this relaxed, informal offering invites comparison with previous guides.

A couple of decades ago, for instance, Diane Halpern produced a substantial volume called Thought and Knowledge, an Introduction to Critical Thinking. This covers a greater range, in more detail, even extending to chapters on decision-making, problem-solving and creativity. Both books discuss logic and fallacies, yet while DiCarlo has a separate chapter for diagramming, he has decided not to bother with Venn diagrams as an instructional tool. He is certainly keen on diagrams and illustrations, though, and finds it necessary to illustrate the notion of geography with a little map of the world, adds a pencil drawing of Lady Gaga because she’s the subject of a syllogism, and provides a handy sketch of the big bang, when that is mentioned. When Bertrand Russell refutes an argument from ignorance with his orbiting teapot gambit, we get a photograph of a teapot, captioned Russell’s teapot.

Flicking through the book initially, two diagrams caught my eye and motivated my reading of it. These are The Relations of Natural Systems and The Relations of Cultural Systems. Placing critical thinking in these contexts looked well worth doing, and I looked forward to reading the details. This brought more disappointment. A daisy-chain of nodes like chemistry and partical [sic] physics forms a loop so that we can move from genetics round to galaxies. But three problems immediately arise: disciplines like cytology have the same status as material items like the solar system; cytology jumps straight to humanity, thence to ecology; all nodes also link, uselessly, to the central node, labelled The Relations of Natural Systems, i.e. the name of the diagram, as opposed to a substantive node itself. The other diagram is even more useless, as the casually clustered nodes (ethnicity, agriculture, sports (?), etc) only link to the central diagram-labelling node, and not to each other. No serious attempt is made to connect the two sets of relations, although DiCarlo provides a photograph of an onion.

This is not to say that the book’s contents are without value, but similar ground can also be found in several other books along with Halpern’s, such as How to Think About Weird Things, Critical Thinking for a New Age, by Schlick and Vaughn from over a decade ago.

It wasn’t this reviewer’s plan to fulfill the book’s title, but there we are. The drawing on p.333 of God’s Plan (!), didn’t help either.

Paul Taylor

Myriad Editions, ISBN 978-0-9567926-8-6

There are people for whom the term, “graphic novel”, seems an over-inflated alternative to “comic book”, and, given the non-fictional nature of this work, we are perhaps better off with the old coinage. A graphic book might be a book about graphics, or a book containing graphic descriptions of something. Such categorical quibbles also extend to the subtitle of Cunningham’s collection. The lies, hoaxes and scams include homeopathy, chiropractic and evolution!

Fortunately, the author is no creationist, but that subtitle sits oddly on a collection of comic strip considerations of contentious issues familiar to skeptics. Something like “sense and nonsense from measles to the moon” might be nearer the mark.

Cunningham’s graphic skills shine throughout, for instance in the case, or face, of Dr Andrew Wakefield and his pathological failures, where increasingly magnified close-ups become a pixellated pink that then morphs back to a measled child. The bright drawings bring dark facts, as in the tale of science denial, where we are reminded of South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, presiding over the deaths of a third of a million people through his denial of the HIV/AIDS link.

The media-fuelled ding-dong about climate change is ably explored, with the help of a particularly well-informed penguin, and electroconvulsive therapy is calmly contemplated. There is a luminous chapter on the moon hoax, and grimly comic treatments of the “treatments”, homeopathy and chiropractic.

The gift of this handsome book would be an amiable way to help rescue people, especially the young, from muddle and mystification.

Paul Taylor

Routledge ISBN 978-1-40-825401-1

Hundreds of novels jostle on shelves, waiting to be seen to. In the corner, a ziggurat of poetry books flutters its pages. What to read? And what to make of it all?

Galloping to the rescue comes a four-legged friend called This Thing Called Literature. The double act (they refer to themselves as Bennett and Royle throughout the book) offers a breezy guide for students to reading, thinking and writing. This is not the journal to explore their many suggestive and useful ideas about literary works, great and small. However, their brief text does provide a glimpse, to the curious, of what kind of thinking goes on in literary academic circles.

As early as page three, a question mark lands in the margin as the authors blithely invoke Freud’s idea of the death drive, as if this were part of our biological knowledge. A similar kind of morbid excitement, just ten pages later, leads to a bizarre muddle about dead authors in general. Here’s the explanation for the prevalence in literature of stories about ghosts or returns from the dead: “most of the literary works that are worth reading are by dead people… There is something ghostly about literary studies, then…”.

Hence the spookiness of calculus, then, Leibniz being long gone, or the ghostly aura around J. B. Watson’s Behaviorism.

Oblivious to the countless empirical and philosophical critiques of psychoanalysis, Bennett and Royle certainly seem to be haunted by Freud. At the end of the chapter on creative writing is a reading list of eight books, five of which are about Freud. In the Glossary, the longest text is devoted to digging up, yet again, the aforementioned death drive.

It is noted, by the way, that the much shorter entry on criticism insists that it “should not be confused simply with fault-finding”. Perish the thought.

But this is an educational handbook, whose Glossary confuses the concept of the double bind with self-contradictory statements and reckons that if a poem moves you, this makes it performative. Given that “reflexivity” is a word for self-reference, why does our duo say “self-reflexivity”?

Perhaps the strangest item in the Glossary asserts that magical thinking is “the very oxygen” of literature: “there is no novel or short story that does not depend on telling the reader what a character is thinking or feeling…” Stories that do not do that can easily be found, in a few minutes, by authors such as Barthelme, Bashevis Singer, Bradbury, Hemingway, Lem, Moravia, Upward and Vonnegut.

In the section on Thinking, the team opines that thinking about literature should be rigorous, exacting and disciplined. It seems odd that two writers can’t check each other’s assertions. There is, of course, a well-known kind of double act whereby one partner can only follow, but not see, the moves of the other.

Lacunae: hiatuses in the text, moments where something appears to be missing.

Paul Taylor

Haynes Manuals, ISBN 10: 0857333712

Now that people feel that they can’t mend their own cars, Haynes Manuals seem to be turning their attention to other modes of transport.

To begin with, we must get a few things under our belts, like Newton’s laws of motion, and the concepts of specific impulse and regressive burning, not to mention Imperial units – the book looks back to 1942, after all.

Then we can take off on a sumptuously illustrated journey through the history of rocketry, with photographs, diagrams and technical drawings of the innards and outgoings of everything from the V2 to Ariane 5.

Given that the author worked for NASA for 25 years and has written 90 books on spaceflight, we can expect a very informative ride. The book is a celebration of engineering, rather than a tale of astronautical skill and daring, and is thus a fascinating nuts-and-bolts complement to books such as Andrew Smith’s Moondust or Matthew Brezezinksi’s Red Moon Rising.

Baker’s introduction announces, with the welcome use of inverted commas, that his book “aims to open a window for the lay person on just what “rocket science” is all about, and hopefully to show that it is in fact founded on basic principles that govern ordinary events… in everyday life”.

It remains a mystery, of course, and one that Dr Baker makes no effort to explain, why all these engineers went to all that trouble just to pretend to send men to the Moon.

Paul Taylor

Counterblasts, Verso Books, ISBN 978-1-84467-748-1

Donning rubber gloves and waders, two French journalists help each other stay upright as they sift through the verbiage and media shenanigans of France’s most famous contemporary intellectual. Bernard-Henri Lévy, or BHL, as he is known and branded, is a rare mammal indeed.

BHL is the best-known philosopher, with the least-known philosophy, who has been making waves in French media, and in his own coiffure, since the late 1970s. With his signature wide-open white shirt, dark jacket and perma-tan, BHL bestrides the cultural scene, advising presidents, chastising totalitarians, churning out newspaper articles, books and moral stances from the Left Bank to Libya.

BHL is also the favourite target of Belgian activist Noël Godin, a shadowy figure also known as Georges le Gloupier. Lévy has heard, many times, the spine-chilling incantation “Gloup! Gloup! Gloup!”, as a well-aimed custard pie hits him squarely in the face just before an important speech to the nation.

Is this the proper way to treat an eminent public speaker? Is this how a politically committed moral philosophy should be answered? Judging by BHL’s violent rage on these cream-spattered occasions, and his blithe indifference to more conventional textual criticism, it may be argued that this is the only appropriate method.

At the heart of this big-hearted moralist’s global philosophy, the authors suggest, is a gaping void, industriously stuffed with recycled oddments taken from its own ever-expanding surface. BHL’s expertise lies, not in philosophy as such, but in the well-financed, smartly-networked enterprises of self-mythification.

The robustness of this profile management has even survived a spectacular philosophical blunder, when BHL decided he really ought to get round to explaining his own special approach to philosophy in a new book. The sage had always taken self-quotation to new levels, apart from classical name-dropping (Plato, Kant et al.), but he ventured to make reference to more recent thinkers in this new work, and invoked an intimidatingly obscure philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Botul.

This philosopher had become fairly well known to certain Parisian journalists and readers over the preceding decade, having been invented by a satirical journalist in 1999. No prizes for figuring out the name of Botul’s school of thought.

Lindgaard and de la Porte’s research will fascinate Francophiles and philosophy fanciers, but should interest anyone concerned with how ideas and ideologies succeed in the arenas of contemporary media.

Bernard-Henri Lévy has 11,459 followers on Facebook, as a “local business”.

Paul Taylor