Hello Theo,
This is just a quick note to thank you for the Commensals; you've done a great job of restarting the SIG. However, I'm not just writing to praise you; I would like to make one tiny criticism, if I may.
In C86 you made it fairly clear that you didn't think a lot of Sophie’s World as a philosophy book. Whatever your reasons for disliking it, I think that you have misjudged it and I believe that SW will go down as the most important book of the late 20th Century.
Let me explain myself. While SW may not give experienced philosophers (like you ?) anything new or intellectually stimulating, it gave people like me a route into philosophy. For the first time disillusioned, 17 year old, middle class white kids are reading a book that can change our lives and our perceptions of the world. For "Generation X" the book is the first one which has made us challenge our preconceived ideas about philosophy and at the same time has made us truly think about our lives. All over the country and indeed the world, you now have teenagers reading SW before moving on to Plato, Hegel, Marx, Freud, or whatever takes their fancy. I guarantee you that the majority of the next generation of philosophers will be those who started with SW.
As a book you may feel it to be a poorly written piece of second rate philosophy, but as an event it will help to shape the intellectual thought of my generation.
Peace.
Justin Bates
I think there’s a distinction to be made between "great works" and "influential books". Some books are able greatly to influence their readers if they catch them at the right time of their lives. I was greatly influenced by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Persig, when it first came out. Similarly, by Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. At one time I couldn’t put them down. Now I can’t do so quickly enough. A great work, however, retains its influence whatever the situation.
I expect that for many people, Sophie’s World will indeed be the most important book they read in the late 20th century - as such it will have performed an important service, as you suggest. But I suspect it will be all but forgotten in 10 years time.
Incidentally, the quartet of thinkers you mention has become identified in many minds with all that has been wrong with philosophy. A book that greatly influenced my thinking, and which does bear re-reading, is A J Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic. A book of like ilk, maybe, to Sophie’s World (though not in the same style) is Bryan Magee’s Men of Ideas.
Theo