What the Tortoise Taught Us: The Story of Philosophy by Burton Porter (PDF)

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What the Tortoise Taught Us offers a lively, concise journey through western philosophy that explores the lives of major philosophers, their ideas, and how their thinking continues to influence our lives today. Using a chronological approach, Burton Porter shows how various philosophers address life’s big questions. By putting each philosopher and their ideas into historical context, he helps us understand how certain ideas developed based on the thinking of the time, and how those ideas have influenced our modern perceptions. Using familiar language and interesting anecdotes, Porter provides us with an extremely readable and lively history that takes themes that characterize each age to reflect on the greater human experience. The book includes the philosophies and lives of the ancient philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and continues through time into the Middle Ages with St. Thomas Aquinas, to the Renaissance, and beyond. Porter explores the metaphysics of Descartes and Hobbs; the epistemology of Hume and Berkeley, and the ethics of Kant and Mill among others. Finally he concludes with contemporary issues, including racism, abortion and modern feminism. Porter is able to explain these complex ideas in a clear, simple, and straightforward way. What the Tortoise Taught Us is a balanced and approachable look at life’s basic questions through the eyes of the philosophers that have helped shape modern thought.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The book jacket of What the Tortoise Taught Us invites us to join with Plato and Aristotle in Raphael’s School of Athens and begin the conversation about what makes life meaningful and rewarding. Here is an invitation worth accepting! Burton Porter clearly and concisely summarizes the work of the great philosophers of the Western Tradition and adds his own thoughtful critique of each separate philosophy. Wit and wisdom characterize Professor Porter’s thinking. This is not a stuffy book for academics who want to quibble about details or fine points of philosophy. Instead, Prof. Porter shares with the reader the essential thinking of each philosopher and what it means to us who want to continue in the grand tradition of the seekers after truth and wisdom.In chapters one and two Prof. Porter connects us to the great tradition and tells us that as we speculate about fundamental questions about life and living we become philosophers ourselves. Our intuition tells us that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” With Socrates as our guide we begin to ask the important questions that help us to understand who we are and what we value. Professor Porter shares the best thinking of Plato and Aristotle with us and notes that their best has never been surpassed.Chapter three explores the teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the philosophy of religion. Prof. Porter takes time to summarize carefully the five “proofs” of the existence of God and then thoughtfully examines them to determine if they satisfy the demands of the rational person. He suggests that the proofs are contradictory and unconvincing, in contrast to the work of Charles Darwin and the science of evolution. Later in his book Prof. Porter will return to faith and reason in the work of Immanuel Kant, whom Prof. Porter considers to be one of the giants of philosophy.As this brief introduction suggests, What the Tortoise Taught Us presents the history of philosophy in a systematic, convincing, and even entertaining fashion. I was surprised by the flow of the book. Burton Porter is a fine writer. He makes his task of explaining the work of the great philosophers seem so simple and effortless. Prof. Porter’s skillful writing and clarity of thought make it possible for us to focus our attention on the ideas of the philosophers and our response to them. He draws us in to the great conversation; he stimulates our curiosity to know more about the enduring questions in western philosophy and leaves us with a desire to join the conversation in the School of Athens and contribute our thoughts to the ongoing search for the meaning of life. Highly recommended.

⭐1. The author concentrates more on the life of the various philosophers and a bit less on their views and what they wrote about – i think more space should have been devoted to the latter2. Not sure why Christianity gets in here – it is a religion, not a philosophy – if religious views are philosophical views, how about other faiths? Why don’t they get a look?3. Just don’t understand how religion is basically preaching Communist/Dictator-style ideas and these are being completely overlooked! “Get down on your knees, swear loyalty to the Master and he will reward you” – that is basically what the dominant religions preach – nothing earth-shaking here and to see bright minds write about this as if it is something profound is disappointing4. Again when it comes to religion, the good they preach is highlighted but the bad – the mass killings, the discrimination and abuse in the name of religion is completely overlooked! Where are the morals, ethics?5. I personally wanted to read more on John Stuart Mill after reading his quote on Socrates – “better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” – to me this quote encapsulates the danger of the concept of Heaven – a meaningless, pointless eternal existence spent in self-gratification – the fool is satisfied. Heaven is Fools Gold!6. Finally it was a bit bold of the author to include segments on racism and sexism when the entire subject of philosophy excludes these very same people, which even the author is guilty of! There seems to be zero Female, black or Asian philosophies or philosophers! And this is the 21st century!Racism, religious bigotry seem to blind the best of us

⭐I am very disappointed by What the Tortoise Taught Us. It’s supposed to be a short overview of the history and development of philosophy, starting with the ancient Greeks and ending with current ethical arguments. The philosophical history does seem to be accurate, as far as I can tell–but I picked the book up because I don’t know much about the subject and wanted to learn more, so I’m not really in a position to judge. The real problem with this book is that it is riddled with egregious errors in the “interesting anecdotes” liberally sprinkled through the narration.I think most of us have an area in our heads where urban legends and unattributed anecdotes and quotations slosh around. We’ve all heard or repeated the story about Walt Disney being frozen somewhere in Disneyland. Porter seems to have given that part of his mind free rein in this book, throwing off quotations and stories where he thought they would fit, but without checking to see if they were accurate or even true. By the end I was waiting for him to tell me that ducks’ quacks do not echo. I expect a higher standard in a book that claims to be a history written by a scholar.I’m going to list some of the problems I found, but I’m sure I didn’t find all of them. This is just what struck me:The first, and worst, error is on page 8, as Porter introduces Greek ideas: “‘In the beginning was the logos,’ the book of Genesis states, which is usually translated as ‘word.'” I really can’t believe no one caught this. It’s the first line of the gospel of John in the New Testament (I tried to quote the Greek but the software here can’t handle it). Porter not only mixes up the Old and New Testament, he seems to think that the ancient Hebrews were Greek-speakers. I can see how someone not too familiar with the Bible would get this mixed up, but a moment’s thought–or a decent editor–should have corrected this.On Stoicism, “…we cannot say that anything in the future is inevitable, even with regard to commonsense assertions, such as ‘The sun will rise tomorrow’…the earth could stop rotating at some point…” (p. 54). Well, no, it couldn’t. Anything strong enough to stop the earth’s rotation would also destroy it, and the bits would still spin. The earth is slowing down, and someday it will rotate once a month, like the moon–but it can’t stop. Angular momentum is stubborn stuff.On page 112, Porter tells two apocryphal stories. First is Galileo dropping things off the Tower of Pisa, which is a popular historical anecdote that most historians agree never happened. Then there is a story about William James and an audience skeptic who claims “It’s tortoises all the way down!” This is another popular anecdote often attributed to various public figures (and turtles; I presume he wanted to go with the tortoise theme), most often James, but the story seems to go back much further than that.In a section on linguistic philosophy, Porter says, “Some critics have even charged that language philosophers have focused exclusively on English…This seems arrogant, and it did not help when one analyst remarked, ‘If English was good enough for Our Lord, it should be good enough for us.'” (p. 168) This is one of those quotations that gets attributed to anyone people want to poke fun at, and is most commonly credited to Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson of Texas as “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.” However, it was floating around before that, put in the mouths of various country folks as a proof of ignorance, and has no solid origin that I can find. If a real linguist said it in earnest, I want a citation.After that is a section on feminism, which starts off: “As one feminist put it, men regard women philosophers the way they do an elephant dancing: it’s not that they do it well; it’s only surprising they can do it at all” (p. 169). I cannot find this quotation as stated, or anything like it. All I can find is Samuel Johnson’s famous quip of 1763: “Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”Porter then describes Mary Wollstonecraft, who is usually considered to be the first vocal feminist: “She echoed Elizabeth Cady Stanton that women should regard themselves not as adjectives, but as nouns” (p. 170). There are two serious problems with this sentence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in 1815, 18 years after Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, so it would be difficult for Wollstonecraft to “echo” her in anything, and I cannot find any instance of Wollstonecraft ever saying anything about adjectives or nouns. Porter goes on to state that Wollstonecraft was supported by Samuel Johnson, but in fact she was supported by the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, not the famous wit and dictionary-writer (who, as above, was not much on women’s equality).In another error concerning Samuel Johnson, Porter credits him with defining man as “the tool-making animal” (p. 180). That definition belongs to Benjamin Franklin, but Johnson did argue against it in 1779, saying, “But many a man never made a tool: and suppose a man without arms, he could not make a tool.” I’m not sure what Porter has against poor Dr. Johnson.There may be a few more, but these are the ones that really made me clutch my hair in frustration. There is quite a pattern here of attributing stories and quotations without citing them, and it doesn’t look like Porter made any effort to verify them. The closing sentence of the book is “Our lives should be founded on truth, not illusion, and that means hard philosophic thinking.” I would amend it to “Our lives should be founded on truth, not illusion, and that means hard philosophic thinking–and some good solid fact-checking.”

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