Writing advice often rightly asks authors: “When was the last time you wished a book was longer?” Well, now I can say: it was when I recently read Lawrence Harvey’s Offbeat Philosophers: Thinkers Who Played A Different Tune (whose publishers offered me a review copy). This book clocks in at a mere 73 pages, plus bibliography. Fortunately it’s priced accordingly ($10 for the paperback, $8 for the e-book), but Harvey doesn’t leave himself a lot of room to do the job. The book catalogues ten “offbeat” philosophers; it could have used more of them, but more than that, it could have given them each more space. They get about six pages each (including a list of questions-for-further-reflection), which leaves little room to explore the depth that makes a philosopher’s thought exciting.

Harvey doesn’t say a lot about what makes a philosopher “offbeat”, or his criteria for inclusion. He develops the musical metaphor: as in musical syncopation, where “the regular rhythmic flow is disrupted with accents and stresses occurring out of step with the expected norms”, so “the philosophers in this short anthology all play to what might be termed a different tune – one that serves to disrupt and unsettle the fixity of rhythmic thought.” (1) That’s a very imprecise way of putting things, the sort of imprecision that might drive an analytic philosopher crazy, but perhaps that’s just the point: in a philosophical world still ruled by the analytic tradition, to be “offbeat” may well mean to avoid putting precision first.