It may be true, as it is often said, that people don't read anymore. Certainly it is true that, outside of a few academic departments, very few of us are reading the classics of philosophy, for example, Immanuel Kant's ''Critique of Pure Reason'' or Rene Descartes's ''Discourse on Method'' or Jean-Paul Sartre's ''Being and Nothingness.'' Given that the edifices of thought built by the likes of Kant and Descartes are among the great achievements of the human mind, that is a shame.
What to do? Shortcuts to philosophical understanding have existed for decades in the form of such books as Bertrand Russell's ''History of Western Philosophy'' (which is sometimes so dense that only another philosopher could understand it) or the works of Will and Ariel Durant. These books satisfy a need, even though they represent a kind of secondhand knowledge. We feel that to be educated persons we ought to know at least the main lines of thought of the seminal minds from Socrates to Wittgenstein. But their works are long and difficult, and who has the time?
Now, into our world of short-lived thirsts for knowledge comes a series of attractive little paperbacks by Paul Strathern with titles that perfectly capture the need. Mr. Strathern, an British writer who is not, it would seem from the dust-jacket description, a professional philosopher, has written a series of books called ''Plato in 90 Minutes,'' ''Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes,'' ''Kant in 90 Minutes,'' and so forth, continuing with Descartes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre and others. The books have been published by Ivan R. Dee in Chicago, which advertises a list of others for the near future.
I've read a few of Mr. Strathern's volumes, and, I find them hard to stop reading, in the way that potato chips are hard to stop eating. They are seductive; they satisfy a certain appetite; they can be consumed on the run; but they are so short of a full meal that one wonders about their ultimate values. In a world where many a scholar has spent decades studying every one of Plato's dialogues, the idea of Plato in a 90-minute, bite-size morsel seems a sacrilege, the intellectual equivalent of a flat stomach from just five minutes of easy exercise a day.
But no, that is going too far. Mr. Strathern's books are well-written, clear and informed; they have a breezy wit about them. Each of these slender volumes combines a quick, lively biography of a particular thinker, a summary of that person's main ideas and, perhaps most useful of all, a bit of historical contextualization, a few lines on where each person fits into the grand scheme of Western thought.
His ''Kant in 90 Minutes,'' for example, contains a very concise description of the radical skepticism of David Hume (whose own 90 minutes are on the list of future books), which Kant was trying to surmount in his ''Critique of Pure Reason.'' Mr. Strathern's first lines on Descartes tell the reader that at the end of the 16th century, ''philosophy had stopped. It was Descartes who started it up again.'' What Mr. Strathern means is that philosophy in the Middle Ages had become scholasticism, which supported church dogma and declared new ideas to be heretical. Descartes put the emphasis on ''reason rather than dogma'' and redirected philosophical attention to ''the analysis of human consciousness.''
Mr. Strathern's volume on Sartre begins, briefly, with Hume and continues, only slightly less briefly, with the creation of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl before going on to a gently mocking description of Sartre's existentialism. (Mr. Strathern finds Sartre a brilliant thinker, but also a pretentious windbag, which is reason enough to like his series.) Sartre, for example, spent 1933 in Germany studying the ''phenomena'' of existence. That was the year Adolf Hitler came to power, but Sartre was too busy pondering existence to take much notice of reality, a condition that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
It is easy to be dismissive of Mr. Strathern's efforts and, indeed, anybody who has more than a half-forgotten undergraduate education in the main currents of Western thought might well find his books elementary.
Others less informed may find the summaries of concepts so compressed as to be confusing. There are other questions to ask about his effort, philosophical questions as it were. Is it better to have a smattering of philosophical information than none at all? The old proverb, after all, reminds us of the dangers of a little bit of knowledge, the main danger being that we will forget how ignorant we actually are and form half-baked opinions.
Another question has to do with the point of reading philosophy in the first place. Philosophy is different from biography or polemics. One reads Kant or Descartes not merely for their ideas but for the play of great minds engaged in deep thought on torturously vexing questions. In this sense, several of the most satisfying moments in Mr. Strathern's 90 moments per volume come in reading the brief excerpts that he has chosen from the philosophers themselves.
''Since I desired to devote myself wholly to the search for truth, I thought it necessary . . . to reject as if utterly false anything in which I could discover the least grounds for doubt, so that I could find out if I was left with anything at all which was absolutely indubitable. Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I decided to suppose that nothing was really as they led us to believe it was.''
In such fashion does Rene Descartes embark on his quest for the one indubitable truth on which his system was founded: I think, therefore I am. Or, here are a few immortal lines from Kant:
''Time has no objective reality; it is not an accident, not a substance, and not a relation: it is a purely subjective condition, necessary because of the nature of the human mind which coordinates all our sensibilities by a certain law, and is a pure intuition. We coordinate substances and accidents alike, according to simultaneity and succession, only through the concept of time.''
This is good stuff. In the best of circumstances, it might even lead one to read more of the original works. On the other hand, not very many of us are going to spend the next few weeks poring over the 800-plus pages of ''The Critique of Pure Reason.'' I have Mr. Strathern to thank for the snippet of Kant, this jot of erudition, that he has added to my meager store as well as for his reminder of how little I know. Mr. Strathern's books are good enough for them to provide genuine education, even if thin education, and I am prepared in this case to believe that a thin education is better than no education at all.


This article was very interesting to me because it seemed very true. While people like philosophy and want to learn more about it, it is hard to really take it all in because of how long all the philosopher's works are. We live in a fast paced world and reading any of the philosophers works are interesting, but are hard to read in a short amount of time. I still believe though that people should read more philosophy because it is a important part of our history and it is neat to see what people's views are on what life is. I think that those short novels on philosophy would be nice to read because although it wouldn't give the full view on what certain philosophers thought, it still gives the idea that the audience would like to read about. I think that as long as I can learn about other philosophers views, books like that would be cool to read.