Make that six

“KANT calls marriage a contract for each [partner] to use the other's genitals,” writes Simon Blackburn, “so it is lucky that he never tried it.” Mr Blackburn, a professor at Cambridge, has the robust dry wit that has typified the best British philosophers since Hume and disconcerted most German ones since Hegel. His way with words has served him well. He is now probably the best selling populariser of his trade in English, thanks to his short primers, “Think” (1999) and “Being Good” (2001). His latest slim volume, replete with 16 glossy illustrations, not all of them decent, seems on the face of it to have more to do with Being Bad.