Tom Morris (1)

Of the books I've read so far this year, this was the slowest going, not because it was the most dense, but because it was the driest. The fault may well be mine and not Morris's; I have always had a tendency to lose my place when reading most philosophy texts, perhaps because I accept their premises about as much as I accept the premises of religions (which is to say, not much).

Make no mistake, this is a management book only superficially. Yes, it uses examples from Harry Potter in ways I generally agree with, at least until a certain level of interpretation, and nominally associates them with business. Yes, it talks about management, but primarily in the sense that a discussion of morality and values is a discussion of management. Throughout, Harry and Dumbledore are held up as virtuous, and specific examples from corporate America are also held up as virtuous. The book would really benefit from a solid chapter on failures of virtue, including corporate examples. This option may be precluded by the business/management genre.

I was left with the sense of emptiness that I often have after reading books on management, industrial/organizational techniques for motivating workers, or discussions of institutional planning and infrastructure that rely overmuch on terms like "vision statement." Had the book been entitled The Philosophy of Harry Potter, and the relatively scant business comparisons dropped, I might have liked it more. However, there are already two books about Harry Potter and Philosophy: Harry Potter and Philosophy and The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us about Moral Choices, which is really about Harry Potter as an exemplar of stoicism, and is reviewed below in mid-April-ish, q.v.

What I found most interesting was to read this now that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been published. It's entertaining to read the discussions of Dumbledore's decision-making in light of what we learn in that book.… (mehr)

The first half of the book is pretty good going. It's well structured and quite well written too. The many quotes and references to various thinkers contribute to make the text richer. But the author is not taking his role seriously as a guide into philosophy. He presents various points of view only to immediately give his own judgment of them and is leading the reader quite terribly at times instead of letting him draw his own conclusion. The fact that he writes "What do you think?" after half a page of argumentation for one side changes nothing, it's a meaningless gesture.

This malaise becomes very evident about halfway into the book, when the question of god is discussed, and by which time the author has already set the stage with his argumentation that a) dualism is far more plausible than materialism and b) he believes in life after death. Now comes a far more detailed examination of various arguments for and against the existence of god than any section before has received, and the author, so predictably at this point, draws the conclusion any reader can smell from 100 pages back. Worse still, he is using this as a basis from which to discuss other topics later on in the book, all the while considering his case to be a proven one, eg. "life has no meaning if not through god". He actually does a whole chapter on Pascal's wager, prefaced by a hagiography of Pascal to make his wager seem more authoriative.

Fitting perhaps it is that the chapters about the existence of god, which give the appearance of being a central part in the book, betray at times such a lacking intellectual capability that it makes you ask yourself how did I end up reading this book?

This is not "Philosophy for dummies", this is "You're ignorant about philosophy and I'm going to convince you of everything I believe while pretending to be neutral". I feel for this guy's students.… (mehr)