2 Books Like The Muqaddimah

As an academic, I am always looking for books that chronicle the currents that underlie the surface waves of contemporary events. Mark Polizzotti's Why Surrealism Matters does a nice and well-written job of reviewing the intellectual origin of much of today's art and pop-culture fads. Surrealism arose primarily in poetry and painting, more so than in other art forms at any rate. I particularly like how Polizzotti organizes the material by theme to shows the present-day presence and relevance of surrealism. Hint: it involves much more than scratching one's head at Salvador Dali's fantastic canvasses.

First published in 2014, Malik's book is an intellectual history of moral philosophy (ethics). It claims to be a global history but given the relative dearth of non-Western written material on which to draw, the "global" part inevitably is given short shrift and limited to a few chapters on Indian and Chinese thought. African and Latin American ethics are missing as well, as are the ethics of virtually all other "native" peoples. But this is a shortcoming less of Malik's book than that of the field of the history of ethics as a whole. That said, Malik provides a fairly lively and thoughtful romp through the history of thought in ethics. I particularly like his relatively frequent compare-and-contrast stops along the way so that readers are reminded from time to time of the way they already traveled as they progress through the book. Ample references provide opportunities to take this… show more.