Reviews and Comments

A great and complicated read. It critiques the Cartesian and Empirical philosophical traditions and proposes an alternative way to understand how humans perceive our world. The writing style is artful, full of poetic metaphor, which I found surprising in a philosophy text. And the style is humble in a fascinating way - MP frequently will identity a problem, propose one solution, decide there's a new problem, and keep iterating through problems and solutions until the end of a chapter that finally reaches something like a conclusion (and even those are contingent and later chapters will point out that reality's actually still more complicated than what he's been able to propose so far)

Its a book that gives a very personal lens into an historically important time. In retrospect, I think I would have appreciated the book better if I'd known something about what was happening in Madagascar in the 18th century.

This is the same way that Greek or Shakespearean tragedies and comedies assume the audience knows how the story ends, and much of the richness of the story depends on the fact the audience knows what's coming.

The writing felt oddly mechanical. The book has a ... gimmick ... that the "real" story was a beautiful epic poem and the narrator is just recounting it. The narrator keeps making excuses for how much worse their own prose is, compared to the "real thing". The excuses wear kind of thin, since this is actually the real text. I was very excited to read this, but ended up disappointed.