Book Review: The Art of the Argument
This weekend I had a little extra time on my hands, because of the bank holiday. It’s been quite a while since I’ve looked at any work by the growing cadre of freelance internet philosophers. So, I decided to have a look at the latest offering by Stefan Molyneux. Not a man to shy away from dramatic overstatement, the book is titled, The Art of The Argument: Civilization’s Last Stand.
The basic thesis of the book is that “sophists” – described as those who manipulate language and appeal to emotion to gain power for themselves – are undermining the basic capacity for good people to negotiate terms amongst themselves in good faith, and that without this capacity to engage in rational debate, civilization itself will descend into a chaos of brute force misery and destruction. He has taken it to be his task, then, to recruit and educate the new generation of soldiers in the war of the rational against the “relativist” and the “sophist”, and to train them up in the art of *The Argument*.