Jonathan Rée

‘For God’s sake leave me alone!’ ‘Why the hell should I?’ ‘What’s it to me anyway?’ That sort of unilateral declaration of indifference must be the starting point of nearly all family quarrels, and plenty of political catastrophes as well. ‘Why should I always give way to other people? Am I my brother’s keeper?’ But eventually the question will be turned sarcastically back on you. ‘You think you’re so special? The only pebble on the beach? It’ll be a different story when it’s you that’s run out of luck, just you wait and see.’

Despite his exotic name, Felipe Fernández-Armesto is an upper-class Englishman of the kind who seem to float on a cloud of contentment, perpetually entertained by the oafish antics of the rest of us down below. His press release describes him as ‘a member of the Modern History Faculty of Oxford University’ and Millennium, his blockbuster on the history of the world, as a ‘highly acclaimed’ bestseller, while translations of his monographs and reference books are ‘pending in twenty languages’. But he is not just a historian. He is also something of a philosopher, and his publishers have now given him the chance to address the world in a format that other authors only dream of: a brief and opinionated essay, with a smart design but a popular price, on the epistemological ills of modern civilisation. I shall not try to conceal my feelings: reader, I envy him.‘

Back in the Sixties, before he became the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an anthology of Essays in Philosophical Method designed to document the reorientations in analytic philosophy that followed Rudolf Carnap’s move from Germany to the US in 1935. Carnap had promoted the cause of ‘scientific philosophy’ for a quarter of a century, first in Chicago, then in Los Angeles, persuading dozens of America’s best and brightest to join his campaign of radical conceptual cleansing. The new philosophers were going to flush out the mushy metaphysics of the past and replace it with tough-minded research into the ‘linguistic frameworks’ through which we conceptualise the world. Thanks to Carnap, philosophy was going to be reborn as the systematic study of language.‘

The earliest systematic history of philosophy, or at least the earliest to survive into the age of print, is Diogenes Laertius’ survey of the Lives, Opinions and Sayings of Famous Philosophers, written in Greek about 250 AD. Diogenes described 82 thinkers, some cursorily, others with copious quotations and stories about their characters and curious habits. He moved equably from Thales through Plato and Aristotle, to Zeno, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and eventually Epicurus, but his impartiality probably had less to do with scruples about objectivity than with uncomprehending indifference to philosophical questions, and a terrific appetite for gossip. If Diogenes Laertius were alive today, he would be a high political journalist rather than a mere historian of philosophy.

The motor vessel Aclinous left Birkenhead on 22 October 1938. It was an ordinary Dutch cargo ship making a routine journey to what was then the Dutch East Indies, and on this occasion it was also carrying a sick and lonely passenger: an experienced amateur sailor who was hoping that a sea voyage and a few months sailing around the Malay Archipelago would help restore his health and peace of mind. For as well as being trapped in ‘complicated private and professional entanglements’, as one acquaintance put it, he had recently suffered two severe strokes. The first, as he explained in a letter to a friend, deprived him of the use of his left arm and left leg, and the second took away his speech as well, though within a few months he felt able to speak again, ‘well enough for the purpose of my profession’.‘