Sound Bites by Donald T. Williams

Book Review

Sound Bites

Philosophy in Seven Sentences: A Small Introduction to a Vast Topic
by Douglas Groothuis

IVP Academic, 2016
(159 pages, $16.00, paperback)

reviewed by Donald T. Williams

Philosophers are not known for their economy or their clarity with words—unless they achieve it by switching to even more obscure forms of communication, such as symbolic logic. So Denver Seminary philosopher and apologist Douglas Groothuis deserves marks for audacity if nothing else for attempting to introduce us to philosophy in only seven sentences. It is not, of course, that his book is only seven sentences long. But he does take seven concise but thought-provoking sentences from seven different classical and modern philosophers and use them as the framework for a delightfully readable and often insightful introduction to what can be a horribly abstruse and off-putting field of study.

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Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.

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