Materialism has more than one definition in philosophy, and in this book Terry Eagleton discusses how they are treated by his cover stars Marx, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (mostly). There is a lot of information about these three and others such as Thomas Aquinas, all filtered through Eagleton’s pretty sharp mind. He’s good at seeing parallels and bringing out similarities between apparently different thinkers.
His prose is really fun to read. I get the feeling he writes lareely to amuse himself. Often there is a paragraph making a solid philosophical point, but you can tell he’s also setting it up to have a punchline at the end:
To claim that [tractors and hairdryers] do not have souls is to claim that […] they lack the complex depths manifest in the behaviour of, say, Judi Dench, though less evidently so in the case of Lindsey Lohan.
Eagleton is clearly a fan of all three of the main thinkers he discusses, but I was pleased that he closed with a very positive evaluation of Wittgenstein (even if he’s considered a poseur by some):
He combines an artist’s sensitivity to the common life with a prophet’s insistence that ordinary men and women must be torn from their attachment to self-serving fantasies. It is a rare enough equipoise.