Writing recommendation typically rightly asks authors: “When was the final time you wished a ebook was longer?” Nicely, now I can say: it was after I lately learn Lawrence Harvey’s Offbeat Philosophers: Thinkers Who Performed A Completely different Tune (whose publishers supplied me a assessment copy). This ebook clocks in at a mere 73 pages, plus bibliography. Luckily it’s priced accordingly ($10 for the paperback, $8 for the e-book), however Harvey doesn’t go away himself a variety of room to do the job. The ebook catalogues ten “offbeat” philosophers; it might have used extra of them, however greater than that, it might have given them every more room. They get about six pages every (together with an inventory of questions-for-further-reflection), which leaves little room to discover the depth that makes a thinker’s thought thrilling.
Harvey doesn’t say rather a lot about what makes a thinker “offbeat”, or his standards for inclusion. He develops the musical metaphor: as in musical syncopation, the place “the common rhythmic circulation is disrupted with accents and stresses occurring out of step with the anticipated norms”, so “the philosophers on this quick anthology all play to what is likely to be termed a distinct tune – one which serves to disrupt and unsettle the fixity of rhythmic thought.” (1) That’s a really imprecise approach of placing issues, the kind of imprecision which may drive an analytic thinker loopy, however maybe that’s simply the purpose: in a philosophical world nonetheless dominated by the analytic custom, to be “offbeat” could effectively imply to keep away from placing precision first.
Certainly, none of Harvey’s philosophers are affiliated with analytic philosophy, with one exception. The exception is the kind that proves the rule: Clive Bell, who was deeply influenced by the OG analytic G.E. Moore, however wrote on artwork and aesthetics – matters typically disdained by the analytic motion. To position a price on “disrupting and unsettling the fixity” of thought appears extra like one thing a postmodernist or different “continental” thinker would do, and certainly “continental” philosophy makes extra of an look right here, that includes Donna Haraway and Emmanuel Lévinas. These are in all probability the least “offbeat” philosophers within the ebook, simply in that if you realize greater than a bit little bit of continental philosophy you may have in all probability already heard of them. However happily, the remainder of the ebook addresses philosophers who’re extra genuinely outdoors the mainstream – or one would possibly say predominantstreams, each the analytic and the continental.
The true enchantment of a ebook like that is in introducing you to thinkers who you won’t have heard of – or when you’ve got, you’ve solely heard the identify and probably not recognized a lot about them. You get a style, which lets you comply with up and dig deeper (thus there’s a bibliography on every thinker, which is important). I’ve lengthy discovered worth in the method of Friedrich Schleiermacher that appears for the coherent worldview of an writer, a philosopher and never simply their particular person arguments: the phrases that come to the floor are primarily based on unstated assumptions that lie under, and you’ll typically be taught extra by stepping into that depth and seeing how a worldview suits collectively. The ebook itself doesn’t go into sufficient element so that you can see that depth – nevertheless it provides you a place to begin that exhibits you the place you is likely to be to look. The thinkers right here have all left sufficient of a corpus you can rediscover them and get into them in depth. Incessantly, as with Bell or with Max Stirner or Paul Rée, they’re thinkers who’ve been principally forgotten – however not totally.
Harvey’s method of specializing in “offbeat” philosophers opens up an ideal alternative to diversify. The explanations we now have for usually specializing in a regular Western philosophical canon – the overwhelming majority of whom are male – are underappreciated; these philosophers have formed our strange unphilosophical thought in methods we’re unaware of, even when we’re not Westerners ourselves. The great factor about writing a quantity explicitly on extra eccentric philosophers is that you’re free to disregard that constraint; you’ll be able to write concerning the philosophers you discover fascinating who, for whichever causes, didn’t wind up shaping the world in the identical approach. Which means you’ll be able to go as feminine, and as non-Western, as you want.
Harvey, happily, takes up some of that chance, together with two very totally different feminine philosophers (Donna Haraway and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia) and one (Jalal al-Din Rumi) outdoors what’s most sometimes thought of the West. The Rumi chapter is especially instructive in that it exhibits what makes Rumi so offbeat inside his context: having a philosophical imaginative and prescient, a love of knowledge, that he expresses via mystical poetry fairly than via the syllogistic argument of these (like al-Kindī and al-Ghazālī) who preceded him.
I do want Harvey had taken the chance additional, although: there are such a lot of different offbeat philosophers outdoors the West. The obvious – a minimum of to those that know the historical past of philosophy – is likely to be the classical opposition of Mozi or Jayarāśi, those who rejected the prevailing tendencies of their respective cultural worlds: Mozi rejecting the familial partiality that characterizes the overall tenor of Chinese language thought, Jayarāśi rejecting the widespread Indian aspiration to transcendence. However there are many different selections past that. Probably the most offbeat thinker of all time is likely to be Zera Yacob, writing his concepts all by himself in an Ethiopian cave. Harvey’s Western focus is a missed alternative – however the ebook nonetheless gives an fascinating glimpse of philosophers we’d in any other case not have considered.
