As I mentioned last time out, I have a new book—nothing to do with drum machines, or even machines generally. (Unless you count philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, whose catchphrase was “Man is a machine.”)
The book is called Why We Think What We Think: The Rise and Fall of Western Thought. I couldn’t find a good single-volume history of Western philosophy from a Catholic perspective, so I decided to try to write one.
It isn’t intended to be a book just for Catholics, though: I set out to write an entertaining general history of philosophy that any layperson could read without getting a headache. If you don’t know anything about philosophy—or maybe if you know just enough to be dangerous, as they say—then I hope this book can fill in some of the gaps. It’s not an lol-type book, but I hope also that it’s at least occasionally funny. Because the history of philosophy sometimes is!
But it’s also pretty tragic. The working thesis is that philosophy’s big project over the past seven or eight hundred years has been to liberate the individual. It succeeded! Two bad things, however, resulted. One is that having been liberated, most people these days are pretty miserable. And two is that, in the process of liberating everyone, philosophy made itself increasingly irrelevant. Most people think it’s a joke. It isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be. Sadly, philosophy did this, for the most part, to itself.
If any of that makes you curious—or even if it makes you think I’m full of it :)—then I invite you to read and see for yourself. You can get the book at all the usual outlets; when I finally have a few free minutes to update my website, you’ll be able to get signed copies there.
As stated, this is not a drum machine book. However, I wrote the book for the same reasons I wrote Dancing to the Drum Machine: because I love the subject deeply. Because I think it’s been underrated and underappreciated by a whole bunch of people. And because I’d like to do something to change that. So if anyone out there decides to read it, then please know that I’m grateful—and that I welcome your thoughts, pro or con.
Hope everyone out there has a wonderful week ahead!