Overview: In Offbeat Philosophers, Lawrence Harvey offers the reader a collection of ten philosophical portraits - each provides refreshing and provocative insights into thinkers who dared to play a different tune.

Often laboring at the margins of mainstream thought, the thinkers herein tender novel and often disquieting perspectives that serve to challenge our examined norms.

Each portrait is followed by questions to ponder, deliberate and ultimately stimulate the reader to think otherwise.

Verdict: In what is a truly endearing new prose from author Dr. Lawrence Harvey, the ten philosophical portraits showcased within these 73 pages include: Max Stirner, J.W. Dunne, Donna Haraway, T.E. Hulme, Nicolas Malebranche, Paul Rée, Clive Bell, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, and both Emmanuel Levinas and Jalal al-Din Rumi.

When we teach, we learn, are words words often attributed to the Roman philosopher and statesman, Seneca the Younger and there is, perhaps an obvious sense in which this statement is true - for one must, one imagines, both know and refine one’s understanding when playing the pedagogue.

And yet it has been suggested by the author that there is a more subtle sense in which Seneca’s words rings true. To his mind, teaching is always in some sense a dialogue; a space within which the absolutism of the teacher gives way to an open and creative dialogue.

In the words of the ethicist, Emmanuel Levinas, that which is said gives way to an interchange of saying. To the hard-pressed lecturer or student attempting to go over a prescribed syllabus, such ideals might sound somewhat indulgent.

Still, in his experience, it is often within the context of such discussions, often enacted on the margins of that prescribed, that truly innovative and reciprocal learning takes place.

Stand out chapters for me include Chapter Three (Donna Haraway, The Rise of the Cyborgs), for all these decades later it still makes for extraordinary reading. It anticipates many of the concerns of our own time, from the link between technology and militarized surveillance to the rise of precarious labor, which Haraway called the homework economy.

And certainly, in the popular imagination of science fiction, the cyborg figure has not gone away, even if most popular narratives are less then enabling. Thus, to my mind, and given all that has gone after this was written, it might well be more apt to think through the ironic political myth that Haraway constructed; for points of pure resonance are abounding.

The other being Chapter Six (Paul Rée, The Myth of Free Will). Well-written, intelligently presented, extremely clear in presentation, and able to present the promised content both amiably and yet at all times intelligently, the German philosopher captures the questing curiosity of earlier humanity, then conveys the astonishing feeling of sudden acceleration as science filled the slack sails, revealing at last who and what we really are.

A radical philosopher in his own right, Rée was a hard-nosed empiricist who rejected appeals to metaphysics, religion and the notion of freewill. Via an appeal to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, he also repudiated a priori moral principles, going so far as to proclaim that we should abandon the notion of moral responsibility not merely in theory, but in practice as well. As he put it, ... someone who has recognized the nonfreedom of the will no longer holds anyone responsible.

About the Author - Dr. Lawrence Harvey is a lecturer in Liberal Arts at the University of Winchester and teaches Philosophy at Peter Symonds College, Winchester. He is also the founder of the online platform, The Vectis College of Liberal Arts. He lives in Cowes, UK.

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