Silent Legacy: The Unseen Ways Great Thinkers Have Shaped Our Culture

This book invites you into conversation with some of the great minds who have formed history; those who have thought and dreamed great things, shaping and moulding the culture and the civilisation we have inherited. Silent Legacy is the story of philosophy: from ancient Greece to the contemporary West; a primer, an introduction to digging a little deeper. In this book we see the gradual rippling out of Kantian consequence; from Nietzsche's deconstruction of objective morality, to Kierkegaard's subjectivity, Wittgenstein's deconstruction of self, Foucault's critique of power, and Derrida's deconstruction of language. The gradual loss of confidence in philosophy, and in the objective knowability and reality of the world, leaves us standing at the cross-roads once more. We observe how one thinker's words inspire or infuriate another, prompting them to more words and action. We ponder the cost of all this, considering the massive intellectual and social repercussions, for instance, of Rousseau's, Nietzsche's and Derrida's work. As ideas permeate down from the academic ivory tower to the street, the pub and the cafe, we can see them begin to affect wider culture and the way we live our lives. Platonic longing for the transcendent, Aristotelian scientific method, Nietzschean rejection of weakness, Rousseau's emphasis on freedom, Cartesian dualism or postmodern suspicion of authority - we can see them all in our contemporary world, still forming our legal, cultural, moral and popular culture. To grapple with these giants of philosophy, politics and thought, we must be brave and unafraid, but more than that, willing "to strive, to seek, to find" and, if yielding, doing so only to conviction and truth.