The Art of Always Being Right: The 38 Subtle Ways of Persuation
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About this ebook
A. C. Grayling
A. C. Grayling is the Founder and Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and its Professor of Philosophy. Among his many books are The God Argument, Democracy and Its Crisis, The History of Philosophy, The Good State and The Frontiers of Knowledge. He has been a regular contributor to The Times, Guardian, Financial Times, Independent on Sunday, Economist, New Statesman, Prospect and New European. He appears frequently on radio and TV, including Newsnight and CNN News. He lives in London.
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Reviews for The Art of Always Being Right
176 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An indisputable field guide to bullshit arguments.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I mean, this is basically the single greatest self-help book ever written, so there's that. It's hilarious, too. Schopenhauer was a real dreamboat.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is as near as heavyweight German philosophers come to letting their hair down and having a good laugh (ok, Schopenhauer's hair naturally tended upwards, but you know what I mean). What in our time would have been a highly profitable little "How-to" book, this was actually written with satirical intent, in mock-defence of the proposition that in academic life it is more important to win the argument than to have the truth on your side.Schopenhauer gives us a short introduction, heavily laced with references to Aristotle and other authorities, on the history of arguments as objects of philosophical enquiry, and then offers thirty-eight infallible strategies for winning one. The choice of thirty-eight is a masterful touch, of course. Had he taken ten, or fifty, or 1001, we would say "this is just another of those list books". But thirty-eight is a number that doesn't fit into any pattern: we feel that he must have picked it simply because he knew of precisely thirty-eight strategies worth documenting. Perhaps that should have been point 39: "If you use a list of heads of argument, never pick a predictable number..."This sort of book works because it documents what we already know in an amusing way, not because it teaches us something new (cf. Scott Adams's Dilbert character). If you have ever lost an argument when you knew you were right, you will have seen at least some of the thirty-eight deployed against you: you have probably also used most of them against other people at one time or another. Schopenhauer somehow doesn't sound like the sort of person to have lost many arguments, but presumably he had some personal experience to fall back on too. And more than likely some of the examples he cites were not just random, but digs at specific people. Fun, anyway.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Herr Schopenhauer is the master of understanding a conflict; its- versions, progression and the knack of its decimation. This book makes a wonderful complement for his other book The art of always being Right. If you are sort of a being who would consider yourself philosophically inclined, you should not let go of the wisdom in both these books. They would, if understood rightly and applied aptly, come most handy in feverish University debates to Boardroom meetings than any other self help nonsense that would be found floating around out there. The only drawback being, most of it has to be used when people are reasonable; unfortunately in most disagreements, people become unreasonable.
PS- Philosophically inclined would presuppose basic understanding of premises and schools; not Bachs, Coelho, Pirsigs. Thanks.