The book is an excellent introduction to what some philosophers think - especially the one by Don Cuppit I highly recommend it!.The others are excellent as well, but Cuppits article was particularly informative.

Philosphy is a daunting subject to many people and for that reason, many do not bother to think about it or ask what it's about. Would that be a prejudiced fear of the unknown? If it were, it was probably caused partly by the dense and turgid writing style of the older philosophers. Hegel and Kant spring to mind. Modern philosphers write much more lucidly, and some, like Simon Blackburn and Colin McGinn even make their writing fascinating and exciting. They often reminds us that philosophy is merely "thinking". Now, that's not too formidable. Freed of fear, we can concentrate on what this "thinking" is about. Well, there are no traps. Philosophy is thinking, but it is a structured and disciplined form of thinking. Once we get the hang of it, we'd all be proud, badge-wearing philosophers.

"What Philosophers Think" is a book about some of the important subject matter the featured philosophers think about, and in each chapter, a synopsis is given about that work. Most of philosophers have written on a variety of subjects. Blackburn, for example, have written about ethics, and truth. Here, he is featured on his thoughts on language; which one will see, is deeply conected with the questions about truth and meaning; and if one traces far enough, also to ethics.

The goal of a general philosopher/thinker is usually to see the big (if not full) picture so that he can understand what we are, where we are, and why we are here. The picture of the universe is so vast that individual aspects are covered by specialists. How should a novice thinker even begin? This is a good book to start. It covers broad subjects as Science, Religion, Metaphysics (the world beyond the physical world - the spiritual and/or abstract world such as logic, consciousness), and language. In each of these subjects, key topics are introduced by way of the thinking of a renown thinker in that field. Honderich was featured to tell us about free will and determinism. Can there be such a thing as free will if one thing inexorably leads to another? Are things such as truth objective or relative? Jonathan Rees talks a bit about that although I agree with the previous reviewer that perhaps Richard Rorty might have been a more suitable candidate for this feature; but only because I think that the book was meant for the novice. The piece on Rees was just too academic and too short to do the work intended. Nevertheless, still worth reading. It would help to read the chapter on Searle ("Realism") first. I suspect that many readers will go straight to the bookstore for books by Simon Blackburn after readin the last chapter in this book; to which I would say, "Run, don't walk". There are many more thinkers, of course, and they often disagree with each other. The point of this book, however, is to introduce the important items through a clear and learned exponent so that the reader can see the links that all the topics have. He would (should) be inspired to read more deeply and widely, and from opposing views. That is the only way one can hope to see the big picture, see more clearly, and think more precisely. And if we should die before we see that picture? Well, it would have been a wonderful journey.

In the preface, this book boasts to be different than all other narrow-minded/academic philosophy books that so crowd our bookshelves. And, in this respect, it succeeds. By not presenting technical arguments from each philosopher, the reader is ushered into their personal lives and views, offering a chatty, informal, and broad look at the drives and opinions that undermine their work. However, the editors are not merely along for the ride, and they too subtly guide and influence the questions and impressions presented. Sometimes, the editors hands are a little too intrusive, revealing their materialistic/atheistic biases, but, at other times, their efforts are spot-on. The problem inherent in this effort, however, is that while this book claims to be bedside reading, it can't do justice to the various philosophical thoughts it presents. We need narrow-minded/academic philosophy books that can justify the arguments made. In What Philosopher Think, the arguments are made, but the long-winded justifications are necessarily scrapped. However, this book does teach and present ideas, and in an easy-to-read, intelligible manner, and for that, is why I recommend it to all. Will you really know What The Philosophers Think? No, but at least you'll hear them speaking, and for me, that was enough.

What Philosophers Think is a wonderful way to give people unfamiliar with modern, western, primarily English-language philosophy a taste of both what it is and what some well-known (and some not) philosophers are concerned about. For those who are already knowledgeable about the subject, the book offers many brief and generally very readable discussions by these thinkers on a variety of topics.
The book consists of a series of interviews, which is superb because most people express themselves more clearly when they speak compared to when they put their thoughts to paper. Where philosophers are concerned, many of them are simply not readable, so Baggini and Stangroom have done us all a favor with this method of presentation.
The interviews are grouped into rough categories, including Darwin's Legacy, Science, Religion, and etc. The book would have benefited from a broader range of categories (epistemology and ethics come to mind) but it isn't bad as it is, and does not stick too closely to any one theme.
As far as the philosophers themselves and the content of the interviews goes, one thinker who is conspicuously absent, due in part to his often commented-upon work, is the American Richard Rorty. One philosopher to mention Rorty was John Searle, a very well-known (if not perhaps too much so) name in analytic philosophy, who gave his typical rebuttal to Rorty and others not satisfied with certain `obvious' opinions.
That most analytic philosophers see themselves as quasi-scientists is evidenced by Searle's own reference to what is `obviously true' and `obviously false' based on our sensory experiences in a physical world, leaving little room for theoretical contemplation. Also like most analytic philosophers, Searle shows his lack of vision and creativity in being utterly unable to think outside of the box. When he refers to thinkers like Rorty, he makes the same mistake he always makes, entirely missing the point, by claiming that Rorty believes that there is no mind-independent physical world.
To my knowledge, Rorty has never made such a claim. He comes close, but the point, expressed nicely in another interview with Jonathan Rée, is that Rorty is asking us to stop asking the question, to change the subject, so that we can consider a different way of thinking about ourselves and the world. Consider what Searle says in the interview: `When I debated with Richard Rorty, Richard would not say that he denies the existence of the real world, but on this specific point he said, `Why should we be responsible to anything? It's up to us.' I suppose that the distinction between denying the existence of `the real world,' as Searle so juvenilely puts it, and encouraging people to stop asking the question for a moment is too fine a distinction for plodders like Searle to make. The result here is that anything Searle has to say about Rorty is simply irrelevant because he has failed to grasp Rorty's message, and attacks a phantom message that isn't Rorty's.
There is obviously too much to remark upon in this book, but one more comment of note was made by the editors and their interviewee, Ray Monk, in `The Dark Side.' This interview deals with the sometimes unhappy personal lives of well-known thinkers, with the examples of Wittgenstein and Russell. It was natural to point out how this reflects on the current pop-philosophical view, advanced by nincompoops like Alain de Botton, that pondering so-called great philosophical problems leads to happiness. `It's just obviously not true,' Monk comments. Considering what the great Greek philosophers before Aristotle gave to the world, which has since then been misunderstood and warped into all manner of pointless debate, epitomized by analytic philosophy's obsession with minute `problems,' it is at first hopeful that people like de Botton try to turn philosophy back into the direction of human life from whence it came, but that hope is lost when those same individuals point their effort in the direction of mere happiness, like a bunch of southern California sophisticates off to a round of Botox injections. (For a much-needed second look at early Greek thought, see ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY, MYSTERY, AND MAGIC by Peter Kinglsey, 1997, as well as his latest REALITY which will be due out soon. I have received an advance copy, and can attest to its worth.)