One of McGrady's top ten philosophers' novels:
Candide by VoltaireRead about the other novels on the list.
Candide is perversion. Voltaire the perverter. Ill-informed about profound religious ideas, he proceeds with caricature. In the history of ideas, that line of "common sensephilosophy" leads straight from Voltaire to the modern preachers and prophets of this perversion. Dawkins is an heir of Voltaire. In the name of enlightenment the Frenchman concocts a literary argument against an enlightened metaphysics. Here literature is cowardly. It is journalistic. The enemy of truth that Plato saw in certain literary forms. Voltaire failed to understand rationalist metaphysics and so gave to the world a distortion. The curse of "common sense".
Candide is a book Rolling Stone political columnist Matt Taibbi reads every couple of years. It is on Shalom Auslander's top ten list of comic tragedies, John Mullan's list of ten of the best visits to Venice in literature and Dan Rhodes's top 10 list of short books.
--Marshal Zeringue