Content area
Full Text
Philosophers Behaving Badly, by Nigel Rodgers & Mel Thompson (Peter Owen, pounds 13.95)
The remarkable discovery contained herein is that philosophers through history have not always been impeccable sages, surfing beatifically on waves of pure reason, but have led messy and imperfect human lives. Who'd have thunk it? Rousseau was self- pitying and paranoid; Sartre slept around and wrote about it; Foucault roamed bathhouses. Combining poppy and selective summaries of their subject's thinking with Freud-inflected biographical snippets and insinuations, our authors proceed to see how far they can go in the highly debatable procedure of damning the work by the life. Apparently Schopenhauer is...