Review: Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno

• Main Author: Alexander, James
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: London Cambridge University Press 01.01.2019
• Subjects: Apologies; Augustine of Hippo (354-430); Consciousness; Essays; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831); Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976); History; Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus); Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900); Phenomenology; Philosophers; Philosophy; Plato (427-347 BC); Socrates (470?-399 BC); Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951); Writers
• ISSN: 0031-8191; 1469-817X
• DOI: 10.1017/S0031819118000414

There are chapters on Socrates (Plato's Apology), Plato (The Republic), Lucretius (On the Nature of Things), Augustine (The City of God), Montaigne (Essays), Hobbes (Leviathan), Hegel (Phenomenology), Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals), Lukács (History and Class Consciousness), Heidegger (Being and Time), Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) and Adorno (Minima Moralia). Each philosopher is treated as an occasion for an essay on certain things that happen to come to Geuss's mind as he contemplates them, so that though we may read each chapter with instruction and benefit – Geuss's particular gift being the calm habit of seeing certain things very persistently at any particular moment – we may remain unclear as to exactly what should be taken away from this book except perhaps the desire to read a better one. The book would have been better if it had had less or more argument: if it had had less argument, it could had been a sort of modern equivalent of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers (down to distinguishing Heidegger from all the other Martins, and writing some doggerel for each philosopher – Geuss is a published poet), or, if it had had more argument, it could have been a work of philosophy in its own right: like, say, MacIntyre's After Virtue, with a cumulative or continuously critical vision of the subject. Unlike analytical philosophers, who have their famous knock-down argument (expressed in the phrase ‘This argument fails’ which one continually encountered in the Oxford philosophy of the last century and which is now enjoying a long sunset in the writings of A.C. Grayling), continental philosophers have their own rather different sort of knock-down argument.