Reviewed by John Peterson
Of course you know there is no such thing as a “one-minute” guide to philosophy. After you have noted the title of this book, you instantly classify it with Aristotle for Dummies or Metaphysics Made Easy. Either the title is a lie or the content is watered-down pabulum. But wait — who is this author, Montague Brown? Does the name sound vaguely familiar? Could he be the Montague Brown who a few years ago authored The Romance Of Reason, an admirable introduction to the thought of Thomas Aquinas?
Montague Brown has to be taken seriously. His book title, One-Minute Philosopher, is not so farfetched as it at first seems. Begin with the idea that the single greatest weakness of the modern mind is the inability to make careful distinctions. The modernist has the penchant for making generalizations at the drop of newspaper, but distinctions? Does he distinguish between authority and power (to use Chesterton’s favorite example)? Does he distinguish between justice and law or between forgiveness and pardon? Or has the very habit of making distinctions fallen into disuse? As Chesterton so wisely said, “A fine distinction is like a fine painting or a fine poem.”
Author Brown discusses a list of about ninety basic distinctions, but the format he uses is the key. Each two-page spread in the book is devoted to the difference between two ideas — ideas often confused in conversation as well as in what passes for debate in the media. Brown calls them “look-alikes.” The left page is devoted to one idea (say obedience), the right to its twin (in this case, servility). Then each of the ideas is carefully and succinctly defined, and a three-paragraph discussion follows for each, concluding with a summary of the key difference between the two—take obedience and servility for example:
Although obedience may look like servility, obedience involves a free and intelligent choice, whereas servility implies the abandonment of our will and intellect.
As a follow up, Brown quotes notable authors (often Chesterton) on the question at hand. Last, he offers a question, designed to force the reader to think about how these ideas might apply to his own thinking or his own life.
Brown’s summaries are a wonder of selection and compression. Without using technical language, he has honed and polished his discussions so that they cover each subject fully, but in the fewest possible words. Each distinction is handled clearly and persuasively. A twenty-page section comes at the end of the book to give Brown’s recommendations for further reading — a paragraph for each of the idea pairs he has discussed.
This book should be purchased in quantity to be given to bright youngsters who don’t know the difference between reasoning and feeling, have never participated in logical discourse, and have no tools for thinking through the issues they care most about. Once started, some will read it cover to cover like a novel.
Yes, it will take more than a minute and more than what this book offers to make your favorite niece or nephew into a fully-fledged sage, but One-Minute Philosopher is a promising way to start. It strikes me as an admirably designed remedy for one of the most pervasive forms of the modernist blindness that plagues us, bedevils our educational system, and handicaps our kids.
(John Peterson writes courtesy of Gilbert!, The Magazine of G.K. Chesterton.)
