Fast Philosophy

Why do I read? Well, a big reason I forced myself back into the habit just over two years ago was because I felt that there were a lot of areas of knowledge out there that I had left untouched. And so over the past two weeks, I went from 0 to 100 in lightning speed on a subject that I had barely any concept of before: philosophy.

Fast Philosophy is a collaboration between  British-German writer Adam Fletcher and plain-German writer Lukas Egger, promising to cover the entirety of western philosophy in one hundred short, accessible mini-essays - with humour thrown in too. It seemed like as good a place as any to start.

I'll start by getting one thing out of the way - this book isn't particularly funny. I know humour is subjective and means different things to different people, but 99% of the jokes that are shoehorned into the chapters of Fast Philosophy are derivative, unoriginal or just plain predictable. This I found to be quite distracting at times, albeit not to the extent of getting in the way of the point of the book. And there were a handful of genuinely good one-liners lurking in there as well - "with great power comes big power bills" is one that has stuck in my mind.

But to disparage on this count is to ignore the actual purpose of the book; and as an accessible crash-course in the key themes of philosophy from its inception to the present day, it does a fantastic job. Starting, as one should, with the Greeks, moving through the Romans (with their extremes of stoicism and hedonism) and the soul-searching Germans to some of the problems and paradoxes currently occupying the world's thinkers. The likes of Confucius, Bertrand Russell and even David Foster Wallace get a look-in. Given that the fundamental questions of our existence - ethics, logic, God - are covered, as well as quite a bit that's not generally seen until degree level, the learning curve was steep, but everything was set out so neatly and concisely that I never struggled to keep up. All in all, a huge amount of information is conveyed in a very short space of time, but I quickly got into the flow of it, and my performance on the end-of-book quiz - 25 out of 30 - suggests that most of it stayed in too.

It is testament to the authors' skill that they are able to summarise so well and so clearly. Yes, it's limited, but I do now feel as though I have a solid basic knowledge of a topic on which I was previously very much under-informed.

4/5

And this goes even faster: