Book review – philosophy

The British Empire’s latest crime – to have ended the Enlightenment

2 December 2023 9:00 am

Richard Whatmore sees trade and colonisation in the 19th century as the great threat to Enlightenment ideals, and British imperialism as an unremitting force of darkness

Isaiah Berlin: an extreme liberal, who was reluctant to think that people act purely maliciously

Do we really need to read Isaiah Berlin’s every last word?

9 February 2019 9:00 am

This is a fascinating example of a small genre, in which the author decides at an early stage in his…

What does John Gray’s anti-atheism amount to?

21 April 2018 9:00 am

K. Chesterton, in one of his wise and gracious apothegms, once wrote that ‘When Man ceases to worship God he…

Only an idiot would choose to live at any other time than the present

10 March 2018 9:00 am

Steven Pinker’s new book is a characteristically fluent, decisive and data-rich demonstration of why, given the chance to live at…

Clockwise from top left: Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Simone de Beauvoir

Sartre, de Beauvoir and Sheffield teenagers; the weird glamour of existentialism

27 February 2016 9:00 am

We all carried their philosophy around in our youth, says Philip Hensher. But did anyone — including the existentialists themselves — really understand it?

John Gray’s great tour-guide of ideas: from the Garden of Eden to secret rendition

7 March 2015 9:00 am

You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul…

Why don't we have statues of Michael Oakeshott?

12 April 2014 9:00 am

Who or what was Michael Oakeshott? How many of our fellow citizens — how many even of the readers of…

Man between vice and virtue in St Augustine’s City of God. French incunabulum from Abbeville, 1486-87

Christianity is the foundation of our freedoms

22 February 2014 9:00 am

If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no…