The Challenge of Things by AC Grayling (2015)

I've just emerged from an undergraduate philosophy degree, which lends a particular flavour to this. I'm very aware of the difference between academic philosophy writing and its populist correlate - Grayling is noted in both of these shades. I haven't read any of his academic material, though he covers here subjects which were grist to our student mill, like optimism versus pessimism, nature and nurture, the place of science and the notion of scientific method, brain science and its discoveries, arguments about what constitutes the well-lived life, and so on. In a book of this popular nature, he is obliged to cover them in what might be called slightly 'reduced' terms - the broad brushstrokes of newspaper and journal pieces. He manages to include some gems (for me at least) within the more basic materials here, little neat revelatory points tucked away: one I particularly remember was about the notion of 'the soul', and how it was an early Christian construction to serve the needs of a certain stage of argument about believers "not seeing corruption", and imported from Plato. At the same time, this need for the clarity of populist prose sometimes leads him to overly clunky oppositions and blanket pronouncements. The voice in my head at these moments is that inspired by, for lack of a better term, punkish sentiments, where love of rigour meets a readiness to identify waffling middle class comfortability! His heart is almost universally in the right place, but nevertheless colourlessness is engendered. In the piece near the end entitled Optimism, he contrasts the 'bar-room talk' of so-called pessimism, and the cheery 'seeing opportunity in difficulty' of so-called optimism, where the terms of discussion have become somehow so leached of severity that blandness is the only conclusion possible. This trope is repeated relatively regularly, as is its opposite of the tang of pointed discovery. Ultimately I respect him, and see his fumblings of reduction as unfortunate dead ends on a journey (the retention of philosophically-tinted intellectual discussion as a deep value in popular culture) which is worth undertaking.