From the Same Root: An Introduction to Philosophy

First Edition Preface

 

This book is an edited compilation of my lectures from the autumn semester course I taught in the Department of Philosophy at York University in 1989.

 

Despite the market being saturated with introductory books, I decided to present this book to you. Its content is less biased than usual, making it more comprehensive and serving as a study of this field. This study is important because it genuinely expresses my personal view, a perspective of critical rationalism, more or less following the ideas of my teacher, Sir Karl Popper.

 

I tried to be balanced, striving to minimize my biases by not expressing my own views too much. I constantly debated with other philosophical schools, especially anti-philosophers who claim that philosophy doesn't belong within the realm of normal life. I also debated with existentialists, whose monopolistic claims about the meaning of life are somewhat exaggerated. Between these two, there is hardly a complete philosophy. What I can add is that I also criticize critical rationalism, at least Popper's original version. The rest might be a mess, but I hope readers will gain a better understanding of philosophy than from ordinary textbooks, and will start to investigate the problems and difficulties encountered by different philosophical schools.

 

I repeatedly interwoven abstract and concrete ideas, ancient Greeks and the modern world, which might inevitably seem confusing. However, I hope my readers can navigate through it to some extent, experiencing something they haven't before. I hope this experience is inspiring. This is a revised reprint of the same course. Its content, apart from striving for clarity and precision, has not been added to or modified. I thank my wife, Judith Buber Agassi, for countless corrections, and Lance Odland for carefully proofreading the final draft.

 

The lectures were based on the following reading list: Plato's earliest dialogues (The Death of Socrates), Heine's On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, and Popper's Conjectures and Refutations.