A notable weakness in the way things are today is the extent to which people have adopted certain fundamental beliefs on the strength of the sales pitch of a believer, having received their information about the contrary position, the view they reject, from this very same person.

It is as if all you ever heard about shoes was given to you by a salesman at American Sporting Goods, or as if all you know about food came from the waitress at the diner.

This is the surprising origin of a great many of our most formative and consequential ideas.

To call these fundamental beliefs is to say that they are beliefs that you build on, and thus greatly shape the way you see things. Because of what they are beliefs about they are positioned in such a way as to colour a person’s entire take on the world, to say nothing of their sense of the life that such a world holds out to them. Yet nothing about fundamental ideas, powerfully equipped to colour all things, prevents them from being picked up in this haphazard, third-rate way. You were told a thing, by a believer who wanted you to believe it, and you did. Would it not be shocking to find that, upon inspection, the framework through which you see the world is in part, but significantly, built of ‘waste’ ideas? …

In that each book sets one series of widely accepted beliefs against another series of widely neglected positions, drawn from the history of thought, each book contains two distinct sets of ideas. Why not simply call them good ideas and bad ideas? 

Not at all a bad idea in that the neglected positions from past thought that I have written this book to reintroduce into circulation invited that neglect because they were judged bad. In a sense it is neither here nor there what we call them as you, the reader, will make up your own mind.

It is certainly not offensive to a modern person to see his or her own ideas called ‘bad’ if this is the negative judgement of a past thinker. There is nothing a contemporary person loves more than to picture ancient thinkers shaking their heads at his advanced ideas.

As for those who insist that this whole good/bad ideas approach is completely indefensible, to make this objection would be to say that such crude distinguishing is a bad idea – on which point I rest my case. What we are always doing and cannot avoid doing and indeed do so as to make progress (sort ideas by their quality) is not a thing to call crude.

These books attempt to introduce philosophy as what it truly is – not a series of answers to the questions ‘covered’ in philosophy texts. To do so they move away from the abstraction that characterizes philosophy books to focus upon actual people encountering philosophical questions in their everyday lives.

The series is called the Books of Because for the reason that the rationale for ideas is central. Cut off the ‘because’ from what you believe and you are left with an idea that is hiding itself, like the zoo animal squeezing itself into the far corner of the pen.

To give the ideas (both the good and the bad) the life they have in their natural habitat they are introduced in these books through characters who hold them and in actual circumstances capable of generating them. It is often only by seeing how a view has arisen, what situation has brought it to life, that the very nature of the view is clear. …