Now in paperback, this engaging book is a critical reflection on the tangles and confusions of modern Western philosophy. Guy Robinson explores the nature, methods, and capacities of philosophy in an illuminating, critical look at some of its essential areas of inquiry: logical necessity, machine intelligence, the relation between science and religion, determinism, skepticism, and the question of foundation and origins. In this lucidly written, historically informed brief, Robinson locates the problem in philosophy's Cartesian search for truth-abstract, elusive, and difficult to discover-rather than in its power to help us think and talk clearly about the everyday world.