Real-world thinking

“Bernard Mandeville was among the first to argue that we don’t really know ourselves,” says Patrick West’s review of Man-Devil, John Callanan’s book about Mandeville [BOOKS, MAY]. “Morality, and its attendant hypocrisies, was a way of repurposing and legitimising our instincts,” West says of Mandeville’s thinking. Such study of the evolution of intellectual thinking is legitimate for a philosopher such as Callanan at King’s College, London. Such thinking is inept, inapt and pernicious, however, ...