While I had been looking forward to reading this book, it suffered from poor formatting. The book was sent to me in epub and PDF formats. Loving my Kindle Paperwhite for reading, I chose the device's native format, epub. After getting 10% into the book, I made the rare decision to abandon it. Paragraphs weren't properly formatted, and titles, chapter numbers, and subject support listings were interspersed without indentation. I could have dealt with these issues were it a literary book but a book about a heady subject that required clear understanding to decipher its meaning to establish my thoughts on the subject matter effectively wasn't working for me; nor was the book achieving its instructional purpose.

My regrets go out to the author. ( )

This is a decent introductory book on philosophy, with a broad range from Ancient Greece to Rome to America to Asia. ( )

This book is more about evolution than philosophy, but it does allow one to consider the idea of evolution (change from the very simple to the very complex through natural selection and time alone) from a philosophical perspective.

Although the author repeatedly asserts that evolution is true such as on page 351 where he writes, "...given the scientific fact of evolution...," he does not make an argument for it. That is, he does not provide evidence for his assertions. He makes an interesting point on page 12 that "faith is belief without evidence". But, if we take him seriously about that, it only means that his belief in evolution, since it is not accompanied by evidence, is "faith".

The author lists various fallacies at the beginning of the book. On page 25 there is "confirmation bias". This occurs when someone only looks for references that support his own belief. The author's reliance on people like Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins is evidence that his positions suffer from confirmation bias. He does not consider the arguments of his opponents nor does he even take the time to express the arguments of those confirming his own beliefs.

The author also confuses evolution with general genetic change. On page 362, he writes, "...the latest example of evolution that we are all familiar with is the virus Covid-19, it is evolving new variants before our eyes". That statement is evidence that he is committing the fallacy of ambiguity (see page 28). The Covid-19 virus did not evolve into something that was not a virus. It remained a virus, but it suffered mutational change. What it did was not an evolution from something simple to something more complex which is what we would need to go from single-celled animals to human beings in any time frame. It merely showed that the virus was decaying. That change illustrated genetic entropy.

There are arguments against evolution using the mechanism of random mutations. One comes from John Sanford and is called "genetic entropy". The basic idea is that mutations are more destructive than any accidental benefit they may provide and the mutation rate is so great that we can only expect mutational meltdown (that is, extinction) coming from that mechanism. Any argument for evolution will either have to counter Sanford's position or come up with another mechanism for the changes that natural selection operates on. ( )