Wakefulness and World: An Invitation to Philosophy

"A deeply intelligent and subtle book by a master reader and teacher."―Jacob Howland, author of The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy and Glaucon's Fate

Philosophy begins in the middle of ordinary experience. Consider these four aspects of daily life: we have conversations which require us to strive to make ourselves understood and to understand others; we easily pick out nameable items in the world and also sense how the things around us hang together; we count things and do simple arithmetic, and are sure we know what we're doing; we give reasons for knowing the things we claim to know. Philosophy gets off the ground when we ask how it is possible that we are already doing these things.

Wakefulness and World takes up this question by reading works by Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. The invitation is two-fold: to accompany the author in reading some philosophical texts and to think together about the manifest and puzzling intelligibility of the world.

Matthew Linck is a member of the senior faculty at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he has taught since 2008.