
Genres
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Educational
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Philosophy
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Blurb
No English blurb available. Maybe add one?
Specs
Page Count:
512
ISBN:
4101035415
ISBN13:
9784101035413
Where to find help_outline
editAmazon Kindle JP
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Amazon JP
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BookWalker
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Amazon US
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Honto
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CD Japan
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Kinokuniya JP
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Reviews
(4/5)1 rating1 review
pm215says
March 15, 2025
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Genres
Content Tags
Educational
100%
Philosophy
100%


Philosophy, well written for a popular audience
I enjoyed reading this – it’s philosophy written for a popular audience by a philosophy professor, and the author explains the ideas he’s working through in a readable and comprehensible way. (There are extensive endnotes also, which he notes that you don’t need to read, and the (harder to read) quotes from the original authors are mostly relegated to the endnotes.)
The book is an examination of why we get bored and what we should do about it, working through what people like Pascal, Heidegger, and others have said about it, as well as some perspectives from anthropology and economics; the author then makes their own line of argument and conclusion from this. It fell into about the right difficulty level for non-fiction for where I am right now: not easy, but not a really slow crawl with a ton of dictionary lookups either. The author provides enough concrete examples and repetition that it’s not a pure sea of abstract concepts. It's apparently sold a lot of copies, and I can see why.
Areas of potential difficulty for a language learner: vocabulary, and if you're not used to the kinds of grammar and sentence structures used to construct an argument in non fiction writing.
Recommended, assuming “philosophy for a popular audience” is something you’d be interested in in the first place.