PHILOSOPHY FOR DILETTANTES

For those who lack a natural fondness for abstractions, philosophy is a discipline best experienced in bite-sized pieces—on a Teaching Company tape for the commute, say, or in a profile of Peter Singer for the New York Times Magazine. Now we also have Tamler Sommers's new collection of philosophy-driven interviews, "A Very Bad Wizard".

Sommers is a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston and the go-to guy for interviews with philosophers at the Believer, five of which are included in this volume published by Believer Books (a division of McSweeney's). His subjects include Philip Zimbardo, Frans de Waal, Michael Ruse and Jonathan Haidt. Topics span everything from evolutionary theory to moral realism to meta-metaethics (whatever that is).

What first strikes a reader about the collected interviews is not the intelligence of the voices (that is to be expected), nor the subject matter (morality, justice, free will—the usual suspects), but the decisiveness with which convictions are laid out. The topics at hand are not ones that the average person spends much time considering, despite the fact that these questions are specifically human. What "A Very Bad Wizard" demonstrates is that some people do ponder such things, and with great nuance, and often in stark disagreement with one another.

If the content of the book is an injunction to think harder, the form acts as a friendly invitation to do so. The interview is a uniquely accessible medium, with its short blocks of text and hospitality to anecdote, changes of subject and the odd spontaneous outburst. Arranged in this form, philosophy can be approached more easily than in, say, "Of Grammatology". It is a far more palatable way to read contentions that "the impossibility of free will and ultimate moral responsibility can be proved with complete certainty," according to Galen Strawson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Reading. If Professor Strawson doesn't quite have the space to prove his argument in "A Very Bad Wizard"—his interview runs to 19 pages—he's at least got a receptive audience.

"A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain" (McSweeney's Press), by Tamler Sommers, out now

~ MOLLY YOUNG