At Christmas I received Donald Palmer’s “Looking at Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter,” and got to borrow Brett McLean’s “Confessions and Reflections of a Traveler” at about the same time. I read them in parallel; Palmer mostly on the train to and from work, and McLean on the can. I’ll keep this review short; whoever wants more details on McLean’s book can read Sursumcorda’s review.

Both Palmer and McLean aim to bring philosophy to an understandable level, but take vastly different approaches. Palmer structures his book chronologically, starting with the pre-Socratic philosophers and following the history of philosophy and the evolution of ideas up to the late 20th century, ending with Luce Irigaray, all illustrated with his own drawings. McLean divides his philosophy primer along the four big fields of ontology, epistemology, ethics, and teleology, and intersperses these chunks with sequences of his own experiences traveling across the USA one college summer.

To put in bluntly, Palmer succeeds, and McLean doesn’t. Palmer gave me the understanding to realize that McLean’s philosophy, which starts out well in the chapters on ontology and epistemology, never went beyond Aristotelian idea of “essence” – but without properly stating this or other underlying assumptions. Palmer also benefits from focusing only on philosophy and from the clarity of organization that comes with a chronological approach; McLean’s dual approach of interweaving his story with his primer on philosophy falls flat because the story and theory barely intersect. His story stands on its own, but doesn’t illustrate his philosophical points and is only rarely illuminated by the concurrent philosophy. The purpose of his book then forces a major emphasis on redemption onto philosophy, which doesn’t seem to be a major philosophical concern outside the Christian world; the first word of his title forces a few sexual confessions that won’t shock anyone who’s been a victim of TMI on facebook, which leads to an excessive emphasis on sexual ethics in his ethics chapter. If McLean cut out the philosophy and hired a proofreader, he’d have a crackling story of an extraordinary summer to offer; if he cut out the story and had the person he thanks for proofing the chapters on ontology and epistemology read the other philosophical chapters, he might have an attractive alternative to a chronological approach to philosophy. However, with the purpose of his book being to introduce people to Christ, the philosophical primer suffers from a lack of breadth. The disparate elements fail to enrich each other – which is precisely where Palmer succeeds, occasionally just being punny but often able to exemplify a train of thought through his drawings. His bias occasionally shines through, but not in a distracting or disrespectful way, and he has an extensive reading list of primary and secondary sources with comments like “Ouch!” and “A fine little book by a friend of mine. Buy it; he can use the money.” I found that starting with Kant I found numerous trains of thought confusing, but that may not necessarily be Palmer’s fault; I suspect that some of our more recent philosophers have a somewhat kooky bent because all the good ideas have lost their novelty. At the same time, reading Palmer’s book was the first time I thought Kant might be understandable material, which I count as a success for Palmer.

In short: Palmer’s worth reading in entirety; if you pick up McLean’s book, consider reading only the odd-numbered chapters.