One large point remains obscure. Dan insists that the kabbalah is not mystical. The very concept of mysticism, he argues, is alien to Judaism and Islam. Yet he freely uses the term throughout the book. This is confusing. And his discussion of current kabbalistic thinking is rushed.
In Riddles of Existence, Earl Conee and Theodore Sider, forming a metaphysical tag team, throw themselves at 10 perennial
problems in philosophy. In brief chapters, the authors, both philosophy professors, pose a question (Does God exist? What is time?) and then explain, for a general audience, different ways of answering it. They offer a series of hors d'oeuvres for intellectual diners not quite ready to commit to a full philosophical meal.
There are no answers. Or rather, there are too many answers. The entertainment value lies in picking one's way through ingenious arguments, encountering along the way basic ideas like the law of the excluded middle and the principle of sufficient reason.
Conee and Sider like to start with a common-sense, real-life question -- Why is the person in my baby picture the same as the person I see in the mirror today? -- and then pick apart the comfortable assumptions that carry most of us through life.
Although both authors write clearly and simply, the waters do get deep very quickly. Most readers will pause, if only briefly, when faced with formulations like "any condition is a necessary condition for itself," but help is usually forthcoming, often in the form of humble examples. "Ontological dependence" sounds forbidding, but Conee, in his chapter on God, comes to the rescue with an irresistible invitation: "Consider a tuna salad sandwich." Two slices of bread do not make a tuna salad sandwich, and neither does a heap of tuna salad, but together they do. Voila! Ontological dependence on rye.
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