The book opens with a personal anecdote on the agony of the blank page. Then the journey begins by breaking sharply into Camus’ emergence into the field of Philosophy, then turns to Plato’s metaphysical allegory of the cave. The unending cacophony of life is related through a scene from a musical as Azrienoch describes how we must routinely push our way through absurdity to focus our thoughts. The book continues through history, using colorful examples and thought experiments to give insight into the world’s greatest philosophers. Nihilism is vehemently rejected as invalid, and we visit (and revisit) the beloved Sisyphus and his punctuated awareness of absurdity. Sisyphus also nudges Az’s head on the book’s cover. This is quite fitting.

I realized there was more to this book than meets the eye when Azrienoch begins to effortlessly explain flaws in the axioms of formal logic and structured argumentation insofar as it does not account for natural contradictions and acceptable paradoxes. His exercises in propositional logic are perhaps the most fascinating parts of the book for the hopelessly curious. This leads to an underlying theme: language and grammar do not uphold innate truths as we commonly understand.

The real fun begins as we are whisked into Wittgensteinian philosophy through his rule following paradox, examining instinctive recursion and behavioral conditioning as failed answers. In actuality, we learn by doing what gets the desired result and attribute rules retroactively. Inextricable problems of translation are identified as Azrienoch likens the language game to both playing catch and building a house. Linguistics is brought into sharp focus and innatists get a thorough raking over the coals. This leads to an inevitable conclusion—all is context. He thoroughly addresses the dichotomy of the two distinct ways we interact with the world, monamic and dynamic, and how these interactions shape our ineffable contexts within language. We then explore the nature of different grammatical settings and our human tendency to anthropomorphize, and the raging debate over free will versus determinism is answered succinctly by Azrienoch in a single word. (For this, you’ll have to buy the book.)

The book uncovers the popular trend to misapply science in an attempt to describe the whole of human experience, deriving morality where none can be gotten. This is solidified with striking examples of how morality evolves with various social stigmas and nebulous ethics. Here, Az demonstrates quite well that it is largely our reactions that measure our prescriptions and not the other way around as we would like to believe. But he balances this with fair recognition that the extreme of this position is irrational. Etiquette, like morality evolves right along with language, and again it is reiterated that all is context. To ignore this is to descend into ‘linguistic nihilism’, as coined by Azrienoch.

He begins to wrap up with a summation of his overall distaste for the stagnation of philosophy in its current miasma of tired semantics and oversimplification. He offers a few suggestions to liven things up, such as learning to contrastruct ourselves by playing deconstructionist tic-tac-toe backwards, and replacing all philosophers with technical writers and poets. (I’m embellishing.)