Andrew Brower Latz's Reading List

"Nagel is one of the great English-speaking philosophers still working today. He’s an interesting contrast to Kołakowski, who deals with these very abstract ideas. Many of the ideas Nagel deals with are quite concrete, and he’s very clear in his writing style. There are some classic papers in here. The one in which he asks what it’s like to be a bat is an amazing canonical paper about the subjective nature of experience and how forms of reductionism can’t deal with it. That’s still very much a live issue. His essay on sexual perversion is brilliant and has been very influential. ‘Moral Luck’ and ‘The Fragmentation of Value’ raise fundamental questions in ethics. The nice thing about this book, particularly for teenagers, is that you can pick it up in any order, just read ten pages of a chapter, and then you’re done. The essays are short and accessible, and you can take them in bite-sized chunks. He’s one of those annoying people who seems to make brilliant contributions to any topic you try to think about. He’s done stuff on the philosophy of consciousness (that’s very important); he’s done work recently on whether you can reduce everything to materialism, saying no, you can’t; he’s done work on ethics, and ‘moral luck’ is a whole mini-industry in the academy now. He wrote one of germinal papers in that area. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The preface of this book contains a lot of philosophical wisdom. He talks about his approach and sums it up by saying he thinks you should trust problems over solutions. We have a strong tendency to want a neat system that will give us solutions and answers, whereas actually a lot of the time the niggling worries and intuitions we have leftover are very valuable. We risk pushing these out or ignoring them if we have a tidy system. And I think the other thing that’s really nice is that he says in philosophy you have to tolerate not being able to have an opinion for a long time, which is quite difficult to do."

"Well, I thought if you’re a teen doing philosophy at school, it’s probably a little bit easier to deal with than After Virtue. After Virtue is very famous and important, but it’s a big, sustained argument, and therefore can be quite difficult, whereas you can dip in and out of T he Short History of Ethics . There’s no need to read the different chapters in order. I think his summaries of philosophers are very reliable on the whole. Another thing that’s nice about this is that it gradually adds up to a cumulative argument about the importance of the relationship between history and philosophy. One of the ways in which philosophy is sometimes taught is as if it’s a series of ideas or theories that you can detach from their context. MacIntyre shows that, in moral philosophy in particular, that’s a bad mistake. So I think it’s useful background. There’s lots of good stuff in there about the difference between the modern situation and the pre-modern situation as well."

"I tend to agree with people like Pippin and Brandom that modernity is one of the biggest shifts in human civilization. It is, to put it crudely and focus on the philosophical dimension, the shift from grounding truth, politics and the self in tradition and religion, to the attempt to ground them in a self-standing form of reason. Roughly speaking, modernism is an attempt to say the subject has to agree to things in order for them to be true. So we can’t just take it as read that because it’s in the tradition, or because it’s come from religion, it must be true, and we can’t assume we have access to objective reality. We have to understand how we think about reality, too. “German idealism can be extraordinarily difficult and horrendous to read—yet it’s also the most important movement in philosophy ever, on par with the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece” Now, because that’s a very easy caricature, it’s easy to imagine some kind of completely self-sufficient, omniscient subject. But that’s not actually what the great modern philosophers like Kant and Hegel were describing. One of the aims of this book is to show that much of postmodern criticism of modern philosophy is attacking a straw man. That’s a very important message. It’s also the case that German idealism can be extraordinarily difficult, complicated and horrendous to read—Kant and Hagel especially—yet it’s also the most important movement in philosophy ever, on par with the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece. So for someone to give you a reliable guide through Kant and Hegel, and then the implications of their thought for Nietzsche and Heidegger, is a really useful thing. This book does that, and it’s very good at not overwhelming you with detail, but just saying, ‘Look, here are the big issues; here’s the kind of general map of what’s going on.’ German idealism is a philosophical movement that begins with Kant and then moves through Fichte and Hegel and Schelling. (Those are the big four at the start, and we’re still dealing with the aftermath of them now.) Basically, it’s an engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy, which argues that in a sense everything passes through the subject. Kant’s critical philosophy, his ‘Copernican Turn’, is to posit that when it comes to knowledge of the external world, rather than trying to get our ideas to correspond with what’s out there, we find that objects correspond with our ideas. Our minds contribute to our understanding of the world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So the categories of causation—of unity, plurality, multiplicity, things like that—are actually categories of our mind, and the only way that we could ever have an experience of anything is if our minds contribute those categories. Even space and time come from our minds, according to Kant. You can make a similar case with morality, where you say in order to be autonomous, the subject has to give the law to himself, rather than just receive it from some other source outside of himself. That is the modern revolution. German idealism is trying to understand how we can we make this work. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are not entirely happy with the way Kant achieves this, but they are agreed that he’s hit on a genuine problem."

"To a certain extent, that’s true. I think his main objective in writing the book is to say that the way we typically do philosophy of religion is perhaps not wrong, but it can be somewhat unproductive and a bit sterile. He wants to say that when it comes to understanding religion, praxis comes first. From that, we can then begin to analyse. “There’s a more receptive way to read, which often takes place when we read fiction or religious texts” It’s not that we can’t use rationality. On the contrary, rationality and consistency are criteria for religion; but there are some things you can only fully understand by doing them and experiencing them, and religion is one of those. So the form of rationality we use should not be narrowly analytical. Religion is about making sense in the broadest possible way, so the sort of sense-making we use in art, history, literature, experience, morality, even the logic of the emotions, are all part of making sense of religion. I was talking to a colleague recently about the evidence for the claim that reading fiction increases empathy. It turns out that those who don’t read fiction, only nonfiction, tend to be less empathetic. I think there’s a similar theme in this book. There’s a very kind of controlling way to read that we often use when we’re seeking information, in which we criticise and analyse arguments. But there’s a more receptive way to read, which often takes place when we read fiction or religious texts. This mode of reading has a different feel. Perhaps it’s a different mode of accessing a kind of truth that’s closed off when we’re a bit more hardened and controlling. I thought it was a nice contrast and gave us a nice spread of topics. I also thought if a teen is studying religion or philosophy at school (or both), this would be quite a different approach to the one they would have met already—different than simply studying the theistic proofs. He also does a pretty good job of tackling many of the big problems that anyone who wants to believe responsibly in religion in the twenty-first century has to deal with, such as science, the problem of evil, the idea of heteronomy (which is that religion makes us in some way childish or not fully autonomous). He talks about religious language and the place of the emotions in religion. He deals with modernism, and post-modernism, and so on. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s quite an impressively broad spectrum of major topics, but it’s not too jargon-heavy. I think it’s relatively accessible. And again, it is the sort of book that, although it is a cumulative argument, if a teen were particularly interested in just one of those philosophical topics, you could just read a chapter and come away with a lot from it."