Jonathan Ree

This is a tiny, 50-page book that provides a fly-by overview of Heidegger's 480+ page tome, 'Being and Time'. I found it to be immensely valuable in getting orientated to the larger work. Clearly, there is a great deal omitted in the Ree's analysis by necessities of space. Ree condenses many of Heidegger's rather verbose tangents and extremely simplifies (or altogether skips) many points at which Heidegger delves into prior thinkers.

This book is a roadmap, not the destination. What you miss show more are many of the single paragraph strokes of insight that Heidegger leaves in his wake as he goes. But it is a very good roadmap. It makes the notoriously intimidating writing of Heidegger much less intimidating simply by helping connect the larger threads and dots together.

The challenge of Heidegger is that at any given point you are liable to suddenly wake up and realize, "Where am I? And what are we doing here?" Ree's overview provides the helpful reassurance that one's sense of disorientation is acceptable, survivable, and possibly even predictable. show less

This is not the type of history that we are used to. Ree has adopted an unusual methodology. He takes the history of philosophy in English (which includes the US) in fifty year slices. He does not try to be a completist within a dogged narrative of 'this, then that'. Broadly speaking it works.

Starting in 1601, in lengthy chapters, he moves precisely in time (1651, 1701 ... 1901, 1951) and tells a story centred on what it might have been like to think philosophically in that year, looking show more back over the events since the last date. He refuses to be rigid in his approach and this is a good thing.

It means that every half century is treated (almost) equally so we can see which periods were times when English language philosophy was vibrant on its own terms and influencing the world and when it was weak, localised and a derivative branch of something else, often literature or theology.

Ree cannot cover everything. People who do tend to produce dry catalogues. The chapters are centred on the relationships and interconnections between key figures so you get a sense of philosophy being conducted within milieux that refer back in time to previous periods.

Often one figure dominates the narrative. Understandably, philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century is dominated by Wittgenstein but, for example, he uses Adam Smith for the 50 years to 1751, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) for the 50 years to 1851 and William James to 1901.

The choice of Mary Ann Evans seemed odd at first. One might suspect that Ree had fallen prey to political correctness (and would have lost a star accordingly) except that, though not a wholly interesting philosopher herself, she was at the centre of a web of important connections.

There is a period after Smith and Hume and before James when philosophy in English is not quite world-beating (other than Mill) but where ideas expressed in English are still interesting and influential and when philosophy becomes tightly entwined with other ways of seeing.

If Mary Ann Evans is justified by her connection to Mill, the other dominant literary figure (Hazlitt for the period before 1801) is justified by his role as intellectual bridge between the nonconformist religiosity of the eighteenth century and German idealism.

One is struck by the constant interconnections between English-language philosophical thinking, religion, political activism and literature - religion in particular. Religion and not philosophy often dominated national intellectual discourse.

The long period from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century when intellectual life was a dialogue between philosophical activism, literature and religion is book-ended by two periods with a more precise interest in philosophy.

The first was the formation of English empiricism, seeded by Bacon, but reaching its greatest potency in the eras of Locke and Hume. The second was the period in which American pragmatism, continental-origin Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein contested the same ground.

The former reminds us of the critical importance of Scottish education and religious struggles in the formation of British culture. The latter tells us of the equally central importance to English philosophy of Vienna in the twentieth century.

Ree is not a light read. Philosophy is a difficult subject at the best of times. Many of these thinkers were dealing with complex technical issues. I suspect there will be times when the average intelligent reader will just have to admit he is stumped and read it up in the Stanford Encyclopedia.

But this should not put you off. First of all, it should get you wanting to know more and send you off to do more reading on your own account. Second, it is good not to be patronised with over-simplifications. The real story here lies in the history and flow of relationships.

Most histories keep their philosophers isolated and try too hard to explain what it was precisely that they thought. This history may be more elusive on such systems but you get a sense of thought developing over time, how it changed in a social context and how influence ebbed and flowed.

You may still need to read a more conventional history for a fuller framework but what you will get from this book is a strong sense of how philosophy related to the wider culture of its time, how thought relates to personality and how much of a challenge it can be to think something new.

It also shows us continuities over time. You are sure to find someone in each chapter who relates directly or intellectually to someone in the previous chapter who relates in the same way to someone in the chapter before that and so on. Philosophy is a tradition in its own right.

And Ree is very good indeed at evoking the personalities of philosophers. You are under the illusion quite quickly that you know them enough to like or dislike them. In general, I found the 'greater' the philosopher, the more interesting and likeable (to me) they tended to be.

That is not to say that philosophical controversies could not get very waspish and sometimes downright nasty. If you embed your identity in an idea, you can feel very threatened by criticism although the best always tended to doubt themselves and take constructive criticisms seriously.

There are 'great men' (I am afraid Mary Ann Evans becomes great as an intellectual leader and literary figure rather than as a philosopher) but they are now embedded by Ree in the history of their times. They are more rather than less interesting for this.

Because he adopts this approach of embedding philosophy in its time, he has the opportunity to re-introduce those forgotten philosophers who were important bridges between the 'greats' and who made significant contributions on their own account.

To take one example, although there is not enormous coverage of the pragmatism that followed William James, considerable and worthwhile time is spent on the intellectual circles that underpinned him and which were connected to Emerson and the Transcendentalists.

We see the same with nonconformist struggles to accommodate the new deistic philosophies of the late eighteenth century and its associated political radicalisms and, much earlier still, the humanists' determination to finish off the 'school men' in the late sixteenth century.

Ree is also open-minded about the occasional breakthroughs into the elite mainstream of working class thinkers even if he has virtually nothing of consequence to say about the development of English Marxism. Where women are rare actors in the game, they are introduced well and fairly.

Those two examples immediately tell you of the price paid by Ree in going for densely told detail of the mainstream struggles over intellectual dominance. His notion of mainstream and determination to discuss connection in depth excludes whole tracts of English language historical philosophy.

He is probably right to throw a lot of religious, radical political thought and literary matters at us because they arise naturally from his specific tales of relations but it does mean gaps - American Pragmatism and Marxism were just the most obvious.

One final observation - he is good on the flow of ideas from overseas into the British system (and from Britain to the Americas and back again) and the way that English philosophers used the 'new philosophies' to develop distinctive national variants.

It might take time for a continental philosopher to be translated cogently into English but there were many capable of reading texts in the original language and interpreting them (even appropriating them). Any truly creative idea (such as those of Descartes) was quickly assimilated.

Overall, it is a very useful supplementary text for studying the history of philosophy but it is not an encyclopedia. It is one long and highly educative exercise in intriguing us and making us to want to know more about the missed bits and complexities - and so I recommend it. show less

I'm re-reading “Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English” by Jonathan Rée. One of his theses is that philosophy has long been a multilingual study, and much of its peculiar character derives from attempts by speakers of one language to make sense of terms used in another. For example, scholars of Latin who knew no Greek might not realize that the terms they were coming across, oratio, definitio, ratiocinatio, sermo, disputatio, verbum and proportio, were all translations of a show more single Greek word, logos. And when literacy spread, and there were for the first time readers of English who knew no other languages wanting to read about ideas, this presented a problem for authors: should they use "inkhorn terms", anglicizations of the Latin technicalities, like "proposition" or "accident", or something more English-sounding? One writer who chose the latter option was Ralph Lever, who rendered the principle "every proposition is either an affirmation or a negation" as "every simple shewsay is either a yeasay or a naysay". Ree's title Witcraft is taken from that of Lever's book, an anglicized version of the word 'philosophy'.

Rée deliberately includes the lesser-known thinkers along with the big names, but it's very noticeable when someone comes along who changes the way everyone else thinks. Descartes is the first such figure in the book, looking at the material world in a proto-scientific way while trying to be true to his sense of spiritual reality. People reacted with astonishment at his dualism. A Jesuit called Gabriel Daniel wrote a satirical novel in which Descartes, bored with life at court, leaves his body behind and takes his soul on "a little turn for Recreation-sake". When he gets back he discovers that the court physician, assuming his body was ill, has subjected it to bloodletting and cupping and other unpleasant treatments of the time, leaving it damaged beyond repair. But this only confirms him in his view of the superiority of the soul.

I've now got on to another big name, John Locke. I had no idea that he invented both the use of "self" as a noun and the phrase "personal identity", which must have seemed an obscure technical concept or inkhorn term when he first used it. (Come to think of it, an idea itself was an inkhorn term at the time.) Anyway, the book is fascinating and I'm learning a lot from it. show less

Probably only for those with a decent amount of philosophy in their past, but with that caveat, this is one of the best histories of philosophy you're likely to read. It's beautifully written, and also 'innovative,' a term that I don't usually use. Ree aspires to write a less top-down history, and more or less succeeds, particularly in the first few chapters. Each chapter is nicely structured: an individual is the focus, and Ree branches out from there, showing, as best he can, what show more philosophy was like in the Anglosphere during that person's life. This is quite a literary feat, and for that alone, anyone who writes anything should have a look at the book.

Intellectually, too, it's compelling, particularly because Ree just admits that most of the history of philosophy has been adjacent to religion and religious questions.

I dock a star for the last chapters. I can just about see why one would choose William James and Wittgenstein as your representatives of early and mid twentieth century philosophy, but both chapters are too long and too focused on those two men. That's a particular shame for James, since his thought is really more representative of recent philosophy than the thinking of his time, and something on the growth of analytic philosophy (about which Ree is rightly ambivalent) would have been more interesting. The Wittgenstein was just too long, and has been told so often that it was hard to care about this particular version of it. show less