This book has three things which it offers the reader. There is a set of essays on twelve philosophers. There is a conception of the nature of philosophy. And there is a comment on the current state of philosophy. Before I go on to criticise the book, I should say that it is an extremely good thing to have a book such as this which offers us a philosopher's sense of his subject, especially the history of his subject, and his reflections on some significant philosophical figures, both those who are admired and those who are not. Without being either history or philosophy, this sort of critical reflection – direct appraisals of the masters – is often the most illuminating side of philosophical literature. Who has not enjoyed Aristotle's account of his predecessors in Book I of the Metaphysics or Hobbes rejection of Aristotle in the first chapter of De Cive? Philosophy may be in large part one's own arrangement of a pantheon: has not Geuss's writing, for instance, been mostly movement around the statuesque thoughts of Hegel, Nietzsche and Adorno? Do we not all use philosophers’ names as targets, paperweights, milestones, gravitational slingshots?

Although Raymond Geuss is possibly the most erudite philosopher we have, Changing the Subject does not fulfil expectations. It is simple in conception, excellent in design, but awkward to read. The reviewer has to tread a bit warily here. For in an unusual preface Geuss admits that the essays were written solely for his own edification (to improve his French, in the first instance) and have only been collected at the request of an editor at Harvard University Press. It is hard to know whether this is a deliberate attempt to forestall criticism. But since Geuss has gone to the trouble of writing out his thoughts on the nature and future of philosophy, it seems that he intends the book to be more than a mere diversion.

Let me say something about each of the three things offered to the reader.

First, the essays. Geuss has made a list of twelve philosophers – all of whom he admires, not all of whom he likes – and devotes a chapter to one of their works. The book is very simple in structure. There are chapters on Socrates (Plato's Apology), Plato (The Republic), Lucretius (On the Nature of Things), Augustine (The City of God), Montaigne (Essays), Hobbes (Leviathan), Hegel (Phenomenology), Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals), Lukács (History and Class Consciousness), Heidegger (Being and Time), Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) and Adorno (Minima Moralia). About Geuss's twelve studies, everyone will have their own views. Geuss is cautious, in the main, fond of subtle distinctions, persistent and accurate, with an eye for an argument. He is also digressive, idiosyncratic in what he chooses to emphasise, unconcerned with context, and eager to use certain works to explore certain themes. This is all, on the face of it, fair enough.

The overall effect, however, is highly episodic. Despite the author's assurances that the chapters should be read in order, there is little direction given, development suggested, or even careful comparison sketched. Each philosopher is treated as an occasion for an essay on certain things that happen to come to Geuss's mind as he contemplates them, so that though we may read each chapter with instruction and benefit – Geuss's particular gift being the calm habit of seeing certain things very persistently at any particular moment – we may remain unclear as to exactly what should be taken away from this book except perhaps the desire to read a better one.

Geuss's virtues in his other writings have been his habits of idiosyncratic concentration, capacious attention and studied impatience. Those virtues, however, are not on best display in this book. It is a mixed performance, a sort of essayistic musing carried out half in earnest and half in an attitude of relaxed, involved or irritable digression. The chapters on Augustine, Montaigne, Hegel and Nietzsche are better than the others. The chapters on Socrates and Plato are odd, setting them up for a fall without being explicit about it. The last chapters are rather bland. One would hardly know that Lukács was a Marxist. Heidegger and Wittgenstein are given credit for changing their minds about philosophy. And Adorno seems to serve as the embodiment of or surrogate for Geuss's own elegant despair about the world. (‘Everywhere is California.’) Then there is the chapter on Hobbes. This is a sign of the influence of the Cambridge School – he chooses Hobbes, not Descartes – but the reductio ad politicum of Hobbes is brought up only to be forgotten. Hobbes certainly could be central to a dramatisation of the history of philosophy: for he, more than anyone else, abhorred the autonomy of philosophy and wanted to bring it under submission to an authority. But Geuss leaves this to one side: though, clearly, dealing with idiosyncratic, crazily political or unpolitical writers like Nietzsche, Lukács, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Adorno means the question is left hanging in the air.

There is much that is good in the book, many sidelights, by-ways, asides. But in general the discussions lack one or the other of historical or critical discipline. The book would have been better if it had had less or more argument: if it had had less argument, it could had been a sort of modern equivalent of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers (down to distinguishing Heidegger from all the other Martins, and writing some doggerel for each philosopher – Geuss is a published poet), or, if it had had more argument, it could have been a work of philosophy in its own right: like, say, MacIntyre's After Virtue, with a cumulative or continuously critical vision of the subject. But this book is neither one thing nor the other. It is what we might call an anti-vademecum. It will not be consulted. It is of no use for students. It might amuse some modern Acton or Casaubon on a short flight. But it is only really entertaining when Geuss throws some abuse at Socrates (‘twerp’ and ‘bully’, 115), Augustine (‘completely humourless, extremely self-obsessed, vindictive and deeply misogynist’, 93) or Kierkegaard (‘absolute virtuoso of ascetic self-regard’, 183). This is not to say there are not arguments in the book, but the arguments are justifications of various types of non sequitur: the first argument suggesting that between every philosophy and every other philosophy there is a non sequitur, and the second argument suggesting that between the history of philosophy so far and our own time there is another more decisive non sequitur.

This brings me to the second offering, which is Geuss's view on the nature of philosophy. Philosophy, as the title suggests, is ‘changing the subject’. Geuss argues that hitherto ‘philosophers have repeatedly succumbed to the particular illusion that they have all been engaged in (essentially) the “same” activity over the millennia’. (9) Philosophy for him is not, therefore, a subject we can inhabit, as, say, Bernard Williams thought. We have no duty to the history of philosophy. Philosophy is not a corporation or a club with trophies in the cabinet and rules framed on the wall. But nor is it a conversation, as Richard Rorty suggested. It is nothing as smooth and worldly and vague as that. Philosophy, and the history of philosophy, both depend on the fact that Socrates seemed to invent something which everyone else has wanted to refer back to since, or refer others back to even when they themselves have not referred to it. For Geuss, philosophy is only united – if united is the word – by the fact that philosophy is unworldly, unrealistic and unscientific in any ordinary sense. It ‘generally avoids giving a direct answer to a direct question’ (1). It ‘attempts to construct something that is the opposite of common sense. (xiii) It is found whenever someone has sought to ‘change the subject’. This may sound like conversation, but Geuss means something far odder than simply changing the subject in the conversational sense: he means inventing new terminology, rooting around for new concepts, trying to stand an idea on its head, being deliberately controversial.

This conception of philosophy is certainly refreshing. The problem with it is that it offers us a vision of philosophy which is antiphilosophical. It is a sort of Jazz Age conception of philosophy. Anything goes. Everything is an occasion. And philosophers are the ultimate occasionalists, an absolute avant-garde. There is no progress, no continuity, no sense to be made, just masters to be critically reflected upon. Though if we ask why, the answer is unclear. There is no linear continuity, no dialectical progress, not even any of the meandering progress which Michael Dummett hoped for in The Nature and Future of Philosophy in 2010. Geuss is far from being the first philosopher to like the arguments of other philosophers to fall apart. Unlike analytical philosophers, who have their famous knock-down argument (expressed in the phrase ‘This argument fails’ which one continually encountered in the Oxford philosophy of the last century and which is now enjoying a long sunset in the writings of A.C. Grayling), continental philosophers have their own rather different sort of knock-down argument. Instead of refutation, they prefer rupture. Geuss does not need refutation, because he prefers a historical non sequitur to a logical one.

The historical non sequitur is a particular favourite of philosophers like Alain Badiou. For him (for instance, in the book he co-authored in 2009 with Žižek, Philosophy in the Present), philosophy is about the exception rather than the norm. It is about novelty, rupture, some sort of revolutionary event. Geuss lacks Badiou's or Žižek's charismatic and exciteable obscurity. While they buzz off into the empyrean, he beetles about on earth. Yet his thought has some echoes of theirs. Each philosopher in the book is the author of an exemplary novelty. Geuss's understanding of philosophy commits him to nothing more than going back through the history of philosophy and rolling his own favoured exemplary novelties back to his house for burial.

The problem with this it makes the history of philosophy a history of the lights continually being switched on and off. What is missing from Geuss's book is any recognition of the significance of schools or systems. There is nothing about Aristotle's distinction of theoretical, practical and productive sciences, nothing of the medieval trivium or quadrivium, nothing of the schemes of Hugh of St. Victor or Francis Bacon, nothing of Descartes’ epistemological revolution, nothing of Kant's critical revolution. There is nothing about how most modern philosophy has been the attempt to complete Kant's system, to resist Hegel's completion of it, or to reject both and return to some sort of Humean minimalism with sophisticated mathematical or linguistic techniques superadded. There is absolutely no sense of the map of knowledge or of the encyclopaedic impetus. Instead there are only what fashionable thinkers call aporiai. Montaigne was not a philosopher. Hobbes and Lukács wanted to trump philosophy with politics. Even Hegel is treated here as the author of an exemplary novelty and not as the author of an encyclopaedia. Isn't this a problem? My view is that until we establish a proper School or Index or Inquisition we are only going to have diminishing returns as more and more pseudo-exemplary novelties are thrown up by famous philosophers, while more and more attempts to exploit the exemplary novelties of the older philosophers are thrown up by less famous ones. But Geuss could never allow this. So, for him, there is only the pathos of diminishing novelties.

The third offering is the concluding argument that philosophy is dead. I think we can sympathise with Geuss's sense that philosophy in the universities has become almost entirely ‘Egyptian’ (as Nietzsche put it in Twilight of the Idols): prestigious, harmless, irrelevant, usually misconceived as the activity of ‘explanation and defence of a set of rules of correct thinking and acting’, and as such surviving ‘by a kind of inertia’. (9 & 300) But Geuss claims philosophy died in 1968 – an important admission of bias – or, he then suggests, in 1976 at Heidegger's death. Bravo! But alas! Is it not possible that this conclusion is a consequence of the fact that Geuss has always written genealogically rather than argumentatively, and so can only make sense of philosophy backwards? Isn't it odd that philosophy died just as Raymond Geuss began to study it?

I certainly don't think that philosophy died in 1968. I prefer the Platonic view that anyone can be, or indeed is, a philosopher after the age of thirty or so: we are all philosophers in waiting; and that though most potential philosophers remain stunted, or simply engage in silent philosophical thaumazein when smoking a cigar (in so far as that is now possible) or listening to music, anyone who wants to can begin to draw the threads of their consciousness together after the age of thirty and begin to formulate that dual sense of self and world which Geuss very shrewdly credits Hegel with having done much to theorise in his Phenomenology. There is no reason to think that this adventure is over, or that the continuities evident to the critical reader between Geuss's twelve philosophers could not be the basis of something more than the occasionalist history implied here.