The Stone Reader

The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, 794 pages

This is a collection of essays pulled from the Stone which is a New York Times philosophy blog. Most of the essays are about 2-3 pages long but some are 5-6 or longer. As such, they are not definitive treatments of the subject but usually sketch out a solid argument and leave you thinking.

The essays are organized into four sections: Philosophy, Science, Religion and Morals, and Society. Each section is divided up into subsections that have a more specific topic. Some examples are: New impressions of an old profession; Rethinking thinkers; Can science explain everything?; Blinded by neuroscience?; Morality's god problem; Some hard moral cases; Black, white, or other; and Freedom from the barrel of a gun.

I sometimes wished that the essays were longer but appreciated them for what they were. Some authors had several essays featured and I realized that I disagreed with a couple of them almost every time. Notably, this book lacked an index which would have been helpful at times.

A lot of the essays in the Society section were more opinion than a well laid out argument which may or may not be appropriate depending on your opinion. I liked that a lot of the essays are relevant. They are 5-7 years old at this point but the subjects are ones that society is still working on such as race, diversity and guns. I liked that there were either several essays on the same or a similar subject and that some of the essays were rebuttals of the one right before it and even responses to the rebuttals. Overall, I rate this book pretty highly and would recommend it for what it is - short modern philosophical arguments.