As If: Idealization and Ideals

Appiah is an elegant writer on impossibly complex issues, and he does not disappoint here. In a world and country desperate for ideals, Appiah gives us tools for thinking about why ideals are necessary even though, at some level, they are empirically false. Ideals function as forms of what he calls "plausible empiricism," which is not so much vested in verifiability as is much empiricism, but rather is about how we think about issues, intelligibility.

This book is short, but sufficient for understanding the most important facts about the American philosophy. With this idea he refers his activity to a pragmatic sense. Appiah considers the role of Vaihinger in a particular sector of research: so the attention of the lector is about the definition of truth, in a sense near to the definition of Aristotile. The new conception of right doesn't avoid the paradoxes and the auto-references, which we can think to be normal for the skeptic philosophy in the ancien Greek polis. Next we pass to consider the context of Ramsey, who follows the model of Kahneman, so that we can value it in relation to the probability theory. Last but not least, we can observe the great importance of Rawls in the construction of the actual logics of American right: the context is partially related to an ideal-typic conception, but we can't forget the importance of game theory.

Terrific, as always, from Appiah.

The purpose of this review is not to comment on the author's thesis, but to serve as a caution to amateurs. I bought this book after reading a glowing review of it in the TLS. I'm not a philosopher, though I do regularly read monographs in some philosophical subjects (esp. political philosophy, legal philosophy, ethics, philosophy of science, economic philosophy), including by such living writers as David Wiggins, Nancy Cartwright and Joseph Raz, among others. Unlike books by those authors, I didn't find this book particularly accessible, nor written in a style that made me determined to persevere. It seems more like a very erudite after-dinner monologue addressed to academic philosophers who are au courant with the literature. Almost every paragraph drops several names. Even though some of the names were familiar to me, often the references alone were assumed to be sufficient tokens for recalling each author's positions, instead of those positions being restated in the text. It therefore became difficult for me as a non-professional to see the forest for the trees -- or maybe a better analogy would be trying to read a text filled with acronyms. If you don't devote your career to philosophy, do read most of a chapter, at least, before deciding to buy this book.