Review of 'Classical rhetoric for the modern student' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
If you’re interested in Rhetoric and what to get deeper into this now lost discipline, this is probably one of the best modern expositions you will find.
Throughout this book, the authors shows a remarkable mastery of the subject, rendering even the more subtle aspects of Rhetoric simple and easy to follow.
The authors also provides a remarkable wealth of materials in order to kickstart any course on the subject, making this a reliable manual on Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student.
Review of 'The Buddha before Buddhism' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This book, though not being very long, offers an interesting glimpse onto a fundamental text of the Buddhist canon: the Book of Eights.
The superb translation of this canonical text is accompanied by a very thorough explanation of its context and meaning by the translator, making its content and subtleties more easily understandable and graspable by the modern reader.
It also provides a very insightful glimpse into the Buddhist scholarship around this text and how it supposedly came to be composed, as well as providing clues as to the authenticity of its author and content.
So, even if you’re not even interested in Buddhism, Buddha’s words, or Buddhist scholarship, this book will still provide you with many snippets of timeless wisdom that in some way will enrich your life and understanding. You won’t regret having read it.
Review of 'Critique of Pure Reason' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Let me be completely straightforward here: this is not a review. Any attempt on my part to produce such a thing on none other than the great Critique would be a mix of hubris and dishonesty. What is this then?
Well, since reviewing this is out of question, this will be a kind of fairy-tale telling of my experience reading this monumental work. For let’s face it: just the prospect of having it all read is such a daunting task that if someone were to ask you if you would rather do this or go slay a dragon, you would probably happily choose the latter.
But jokes aside, truth is that Kant’s writing tends to be as clear as Victorian London’s famous smog. This is so much so that this opaqueness of his is almost a common trope among philosophers. So, for the purpose of my tale, what this means …
Let me be completely straightforward here: this is not a review. Any attempt on my part to produce such a thing on none other than the great Critique would be a mix of hubris and dishonesty. What is this then?
Well, since reviewing this is out of question, this will be a kind of fairy-tale telling of my experience reading this monumental work. For let’s face it: just the prospect of having it all read is such a daunting task that if someone were to ask you if you would rather do this or go slay a dragon, you would probably happily choose the latter.
But jokes aside, truth is that Kant’s writing tends to be as clear as Victorian London’s famous smog. This is so much so that this opaqueness of his is almost a common trope among philosophers. So, for the purpose of my tale, what this means is that tackling it head on, especially on this Critique, looked then more like a challenge to be overcome than an opportunity for a philosophical promenade on Kant’s ideas. So what inspired me to overcome my fears? What was the tale behind this accomplishment?
Well, it all started when I found myself a philosophy student at college, and Kant was always popping up in the course’s syllabuses in the many classes I took on the subject of modern philosophy. However, since the philosophical canon is so vast, and there’s so little time to read all of it, that if it is true that I had until now many opportunities to read Kant, it is also true that almost all of those readings were mainly fragmentary, of selected texts focusing on particular subjects, never the whole of one of the critiques.
That meant that I kind of dodged my way throughout most of college without having neither the inclination nor the obligation to read Kant in depth, least of all this Critique. What I knew about it was mostly encyclopedic common places based on what I had learned in class and the things I read here and there on secondary sources. But this was about to change.
What happened was that I was finally presented with an opportunity to enroll in a class completely dedicated to reading Kant’s first critique. This class was a seminar, so the work was to be divided in parts, and each student would be assigned a bit of the critique to present to the rest of the group. So now I was faced with a choice: I could, if I so wished, to remain a fragmentary reader of Kant, going happily about my college life without ever thinking much of it; or I could make the most of the opportunity and give the whole reading a try. Naively, I chose the latter (I’m not much of a dragon slayer anyway).
And this was how I got into reading this book in the first place. Now that I have finished it, and with that perfect accuracy that only hindsight offers, I’m pretty glad I chose to do so. Imagining philosophy as country, Kant would be one of its most important cities, and this work this city’s most splendid cathedral. And since I was more of a philosophical tourist reading it, I now at least have this selfie to show off my intellectual prowess while I bask on the superficial joy of having accomplished such a colossal task.
Now, if you were to ask me for details about what I have learned and what insights I got from this work, I would definitely start spewing some trivialities that in the end would just amount to an incoherent blabber about Kant’s epistemological ideas. But I’m not worried. Why not? Because perhaps my tourist eye allowed me to fall in love with things I noticed here and there, and since this is such a complicated work, covering a lot of ground and with many layers of interpretation, I’m now more willing to return there and appreciate once again its beauties, but now with a different regard—and, who knows, maybe I can now move there and really get to know in depth this awesome cathedral. Until then I at least have this: been there, done that. For now this will have to do.
A guide to writing English informed by recent scholarship (linguistics, cognative science, and such like).
Review of 'The Sense of Style' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
At first, I confess, I wasn’t thrilled by it. It seemed ok, while a bit posh. But that, I think, happened, because I was not familiar with Pinker’s style. And truth is that his is a peculiar one: thoroughly backed by solid research, insightful examples and timely delivery.
In a guide about style for the 21st century thinker, Pinker shines as someone who not only has a masterful theoretical grasp of the subject at hand, but who is also a master of the craft itself. And thanks to this, the book is as easy to read as it is to understand.
The content, however, goes beyond what you would expect from such a guide. Pinker is not merely focused on the plethora of dos and donts of the writing craft, but on making you understand why this or that is preferable to some other alternative. And by doing so, …
At first, I confess, I wasn’t thrilled by it. It seemed ok, while a bit posh. But that, I think, happened, because I was not familiar with Pinker’s style. And truth is that his is a peculiar one: thoroughly backed by solid research, insightful examples and timely delivery.
In a guide about style for the 21st century thinker, Pinker shines as someone who not only has a masterful theoretical grasp of the subject at hand, but who is also a master of the craft itself. And thanks to this, the book is as easy to read as it is to understand.
The content, however, goes beyond what you would expect from such a guide. Pinker is not merely focused on the plethora of dos and donts of the writing craft, but on making you understand why this or that is preferable to some other alternative. And by doing so, you get a better sense why some conventions are to be followed while others discarded. This makes the book extremely pedagogical, adding to its usefulness.
Its 6 chapters cover a lot of ground: from what makes some piece of writing good writing to the usefulness of the classic style of prose compared with others that are less clear and less useful for intellectual purposes; from the unfortunate but inescapable trappings of knowing too much while explaining too little to the understanding of the fundamental structure of language itself; from how to strive and acheive the overall coherence required required to make the proper sense you aim at to discussing what make this or that commonly accepted rule of writing right or wrong (and you’re wrong most of the time if you think there is a right for each particular case).
Thanks to Pinker’s expertise in linguistics, his explanations as well as his understandings of the many complicated features of the English language (and languages in general) allow him to cut right through the many levels of bullshit that many think constitute a clear and precise use of language while showing you exactly how to achieve precisely that. Thanks to his warnings and by showing you what works and what doesn’t, writing may not become easy, but at least a bit less complicated.
As I’m not familiar enough either with the English language itself (for it is not my mother tongue) or with the field of linguistics, I’m not competent enough to find compromising faults on this manual. What I can do though is to share the pleasure I had in reading it, while recommending it to anyone who, like me, wants to improve her/his writing skills by [finally?] understanding why some choices are better than others. If this topic is your cup of tea, I’ll add: drink it—you won’t regret it.
