This collection of brief, provocative essays by A.C. Grayling (The Good Book; The God Argument) continues his case for philosophy's contribution to the public conversation about real-world questions. As Grayling describes in his introduction, the essays are "a miscellany unified by the effort to... explore, and to suggest perspectives upon, different facets of this time in our world." Written in the shadow of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they extend his arguments to geopolitics and societal changes sweeping the globe.
The first essay criticizes the label "The Great War" for World War I as being misleading, tidying our perceptions of the war and understating both its ongoing impact and its relative scale. It's an important point, but Grayling then turns the essay into a surprising defense of the study of history. He is transparent about his ideological leanings and can be scathing to reinforce his point: in his essay on the modernizing of the Chinese economy and its practice of "re-education through labour," he comments, "How membership of the World Trade Organisation was given to a country whose economy benefits from slave labour on such a scale would be a mystery if morality ever played a part in monetary considerations."
He analyzes the bedrock necessity of free speech and when it should be limited, the paradoxes of sleep and whether success can be defined by what we achieve. Each essay is a jewel. Taken together, they provide a spirited defense of the importance of philosophy and the humanities in general while calling us to rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer