essentials of philosophy

I decided maybe a year or two ago that I should learn at least the basics of philosophy if I truly have an interest of learning truth. If I really want to seek truth I need to understand how other people believe they came to truth, even if I do not ultimately agree with their methods or conclusions.

Because of this I got the aforementioned philosophy joke book and I asked for philosophy books for birthday and Christmas gifts. My sister then got me the book Essentials of Philosophy: The Basic Concepts of the World's Greatest Thinkers by James Mannion, which is published through Barnes & Noble.

Overall, I like the structure of the book. The chapters are essentially collections of descriptions of the perspectives of philosophers who fit into a specific category. So, for example, there is a chapter on Existentialism that is broken into five parts, each describing the perspectives of a different existential philosopher. The reason I like this is that it allows me to get a summarized view of what each person believed and why, so I can know who I want to investigate further.

The book also has its weaknesses, however. Probably the most significant weakness is that the author has a very hard time hiding his opinions. He takes every opportunity to bash the Catholic Church. He is also willing to make excuses for philosophers and philosophies that he likes, such as why it was not Nietzsche's fault the Nazis liked him so much. Normally I don't care about editorializing, but I read this as more of a text book, so I expected the author to be more objective.

Mannion actually takes the editorializing to the level of saying that the three major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) should just learn to get along since they worship the same God anyway. To an outsider, whether the different religions serve the same God is more a question of semantics, but he should still know better than to make his assertion in this particular book.

I did notice that some philosophical ideas were skipped that I figured would be covered. Among these were Schrödinger's cat and Pascal's wager. I do not expect every philosophical idea to be covered in a philosophy overview such as this, but I consider the two above concepts important enough to Philosophy that they should have been included in the book. There is probably something else that should have been included that I simply do not know about.

Finally, there are some minor typographical issues that I found some people online complain about, but most of those do not impact the accuracy of the information that I care about. These are only noteworthy if this will annoy a particular reader.

Now, for the real purpose of the post. As I was reading the book I started thinking that it would be a good idea to do a series of posts on different philosophical perspectives and how they mesh with how I believe. The book provides a great structure to design a series, so much of the design work would be done. Also, it would be interesting to see which philosophies agree with or contradict my interpretation of the Bible. I would probably cover thirty to forty different perspectives, so this would not be a short series.

There are a few reasons why I think this would be a good idea and a few why I think it would be a bad idea.

The Good:

1. Some readers will enjoy it.
2. I believe that it is good to seek truth.
3. The series would not be too pervasive because I would only post something on the series once every couple of weeks.
4. This gives me a ready-made topic to post on.

The Bad:

1. Some readers will be bored by it.
2. I will probably have to oversimplify the philosophies that I discuss to keep the posts manageable.
3. I am not an expert.
4. This will take effort on my part.

What do you think? Would you enjoy or be bored by this type of discussion? Is it something that will be worth the time and effort?