From Here

My Oma, following my studies with intense grandmotherly interest, recently asked me what philosophy was. Halfway through a mumbled and viscous answer that somehow involved Immanuel Kant, the reality of the external world, and falling autumn leaves, I realized I had no idea what I was talking about. Forget about six-year-old children, if you can't explain something to your Oma you really don't know what you're talking about and you should be quiet. For this reason, I have always been intensely dissatisfied with introductory texts to philosophy. They seem to favour a method of introducing the student to philosophy through its history rather than as a lively practice. I could (kind of) explain to my Oma what philosophers have done in the past, but not the point of why they did it. I don't care (and nor did my Oma) about Descartes' solution to solipsism in the context of 17th-century debates over the nature of the mind. I wanted to be able to articulate what philosophy can be used for today. I wanted to interest my Oma. Historicism, sometimes, is overrated. John Faithful Hamer, thankfully, takes a qualitatively different tact with philosophy. It's no longer about entering some parochial specialist debate within a subset of scholarship and trying to re-trace those argument patterns, but something that reciprocally flows in and out of life. Or, if you want to go with the continental philosophers, a kind of re-territorialization of the everyday. This precisely is its strength: Hamer shuns abstraction. Vico sees philosophy as a practice peculiar to urban life, and in that Hamer knows that any thinking needs a backdrop, a setting in a city. Just as one cannot imagine Socrates without his Athens or even Kant without his Königsberg, one cannot fathom Hamer without the winding colours of Montreal, knitting his thinking into the liturgy of its everyday. While this book is occasional and aphoristic, it is precisely this occasionality that makes it, in the end, so scary. Because philosophy for Hamer is not just a discipline to be confined to esoterically serious productions of reason, but something buoyantly embedded in even the most banal acts (e.g., see his section on noise levels in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal), it has something to say to literally everything. The philosophy found here is a way to live; or better, a way to learn how to die (Plato). To find something so large in a book so small is an accomplishment indeed. Next time she's in Montreal, I hope that I can introduce him to my Oma. Maybe then she'll know what philosophy is about. And, if I listen, maybe I will too.—Adam Smith, philosophy student, McGill University (Montreal, Quebec)