I love Russel and his insightful presentation of the last few thousand years of philosophy is well structured even if overly historicised
.
The problem is this book was from lectures written to the late 40’s and it leaves a gap that is just too wide for it to feel current. It is interesting in what main issues sre identified that are relevant today, but it also misses many others, the world philosophical issues have gone far beyond what is described and there remains a vast gap.
I wouod read a different history of philosophy despite my admiration for the author and his work. ( )

This was a long and dry book, but worth the read if you study philosophy. I wouldn't recommend this to beginners or people just interested in the topic. It's difficult reading and very opinionated. Keep in mind beforehand that this was written during WWII and it shows with the non-stop comparing to Hitler. To some, this is a turn off, but Russell really didn't like Hitler and was worried about people who abused philosophy at the time. In some ways, I can see how 2020 isn't that different since people seem to fear logic and embrace optimistic nostalgia a little too much.

There's a lot to take in here though. It's obvious Russell is a philosopher and isn't playing around. He likes a lot of them, but at the same time he can see the flaws in most of them. Take Plato. I liked the fact he understands Plato is one of the "fathers" of philosophy, but he also understands Plato is dated or wrong with some of his ideas. Russell isn't shy at pointing out most of these respected philosophers have backwards ideas about women, however, Russell could have talk more about women philosophy himself in this book.

Russell has a mini bio about each person he focuses on before he talks about the philosophy. I liked that part because I believe knowing about these guys helps. I see a lot of people just focus on their philosophy and seem not to care about them. Yet, unlike some fiction, the way these men think has a lot to do with their past. I have yet to read John Dewy, but Russell brings up the fact he is from New England (Vermont) and his philosophy shows that at times.

I love Russell a lot. Not sure he's my favorite philosopher, but he's not that far off from my love for Spinoza. ( )

A lengthy project. Mind-bending. Best when Russell adds his own commentary and occasional snark. Required reading for basically anybody. ( )

This book is valuable, not only for introduction it provides into philosophy, but for the compassion and integrity with which it is presented.

Bertrand Russell writes,

"When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind." (p. 39)

No truer words were ever spoken. (I often wish that other people would attempt to understand my point of view, as - I hope - I attempt to understand theirs, rather than just assuming I'm uninformed or misguided.) We like to think that we are superior to our predecessors, that we are the inheritors of an enlightened age - but perhaps it would be more accurate to simply say that we are inheritors. ( )

Grad school piqued my interest in philosophy, and once I had free time to read what I wanted (i.e. once I graduated), my first foray into the daunting ocean of philosophy was Will Durant's admirable book The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers. It was refreshing to gain some context to many hitherto familiar names, to begin going beyond a purely nominal understanding of western philosophy. I thought of working through Copleston's 11-volume history thereafter but opted for the arguably more ambitious step of absorbing original sources. I read (slowly) through what I considered the major works of Plato (The Republic), Aristotle (Ethics, Politics, Poetics), Spinoza (Ethics, Theologico-Political Treatise), Descartes (Discourse, Method), Bacon (Essays), Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, Prolegomena), Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit), Schopenhauer (The World As Will and Presentation), and Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human). Seven years later, I found myself in need not only of a reinforcement of all that I'd ingested but also some means of putting it all together. As it turns out, Russell's inimitable book was just what I needed to add some cohesion to the story.

Read full review here: http://www.chrisviabookreviews.com/2017/09/14/the-history-of-western-philosophy-...

I made a big mistake in this book. Not in selecting it but in consuming it as an audio book. Thus I feel like I cannot write a fair review of the book itself. Still, I will try to describe it.

Some background: The book was written during World War 2. This doesn't matter much in general but should be understood as the author's environment when describing the merits of certain philosophies.

The book is walking the reader (listener) through ages, starting with Socrates, and ending with Dewie (spelling?) who was contemporary with Russell. We get a description of the life and ideas, and reasoning behind the ideas for dozens of important philosophers and I don't think anyone I had known about beforehand were not mentioned.

In time we jump from Socratic Athen to early Catholicism, to mid Christianity (1200s) to the renaissance and end up in the industrial era with Marx and Nietzsche. There seems to be huge gaps where no major discoveries/changes were made. I don't think that is true, but is probably the joke history plays on us by preserving some documents but not others.

I could consider reading this book again, but then as a proper book where I can jump around and stop and think. I will give it 4 stars for the potential, not for what it gave me. ( )

An extraordinary book. Very much a personal perspective, we get the author's view on the value and the rights and wrongs of almost every philosopher he mentions. To the non-philosopher (like me!) the issues with which philosophers have grappled through most of history now seem of little interest and less importance. In later centuries, the thinkers seem to immerse themselves in perspectives that seem wilfully incoherent - for example, the metaphysical idea that there is no 'real world', that what we perceive as 'real things' such as a shovel, are only 'real' to the extent that we perceive them. Whether there's value in such debate is very hard to grasp. Its as though the philosopher is inventing concepts in order to explore them. On completing the book I started looking for an explanation of philosophy as studied 'today'.
Wikipedia's entry on metaphysics suggests that little progress is ever made:
"The strong, classical view assumes that the objects studied by metaphysics exist independently of any observer, so that the subject is the most fundamental of all sciences. The weak, modern view assumes that the objects studied by metaphysics exist inside the mind of an observer, so the subject becomes a form of introspection and conceptual analysis."
Clearly, there is a difference (sometime subtle, sometimes deep and significant) between an object itself (a dining table for example) and the object as perceived by a particular individual at a particular time. My kitchen table is sometimes simply utilitarian - I eat my breakfast and read the paper without giving the table much if any thought. If we have guests for an informal meal, the table has more significance - is it clean? Is it cluttered? Is it big enough?
If there's some real(!) value in employing university departments to study - over decades and centuries - the subtleties of what is real and what is unreal in my relationship with the kitchen table, I've not yet comprehended the nature of that value.

Book One (and bits of Book Three) read 2020.

Magisterial is the only word for it. The breadth of knowledge here is enormous, and it is immensely readable - it feels chatty but never shallow. It does occasionally drift into long-windedness, though perhaps that's only a result of some things being more interesting than others (sorry Plotinus).

Book Two next, after a break... ( )

The author covers a great deal of western ideas in this work; from the pre-Socratics to the thinking of the modern era. I have heard that Russell was rather biased, but I would need to read more general works to compare him to another author.

This work is quite lengthy and includes short biographies of all of the people he covers. ( )

Finally! It took several months, but I finally finished. And this book was worth every minute. It's the best history of philosophy I've read. Not that I have read enough histories to determine that this is the best out there. But I have read a few which I can compare it to. Many histories of philosophy are far too simplistic, written at a level appropriate for a junior high student. I tried to break away from that type by reading Frederick Coppleston's history, but that was over-correcting the problem. Coppleston's history is very long (9 volumes at ~500pgs each) and far too dull for a casual reader. It is only suited for a dedicated student of philosophy. I got through the first volume and gave up.

Russell's history, however, is written perfectly for a casual reader with a college level education. His style is easy to read and even contains few bits of dry British humor. But aside from the prose, what really makes Russell's history superior is the manner in which he discusses each philosopher's theories. Russell explains the philosopher's biographical background and the major events of his time. He uses this contextual material to illustrate how external events influenced the thoughts of each philosopher. I think that is something that most histories of philosophy lack. And where the do include some context, it is usually a simple biography; they don't explain how certain events may have influenced modes of thought.

Another element that I very much enjoyed was Russell's own personality and opinions coming through in his critiques of past philosophers. For most of them, he maintains a commendable level of objectivity. But for those whose philosophies led to the foundations of Nazi fascism, you can sense his indignation. Russell was a Brit, and he wrote this history during WWII, so you might suspect there is something of a patriotic distrust of the German philosophers. But Russell was far from a nationalist either (he was thrown in jail for his pacifism during WWI). I think he disliked the German idealists (particularly Hegel and Nietzsche) because he was a humanist and liberal that could not tolerate any philosophy that could be used to promote the subjugation of one set of people by another.

A couple items I thought were missing from this history were discussions of Wittgenstein and Godel. I can understand Russell's reluctance to discuss Wittgenstein. Russell was Wittgenstein's teacher at Cambridge. And Godel's theorem essentially crushed Russell's life's work to create a complete and consistent logic, so I can also understand his reticence on that subject. But getting Russell's perspective on both of those men would have been extremely fascinating.

If you do decide to read this, I would highly, highly, highly recommend that you first read Logicomix, a graphic novel about several philosophers involved in the search for truth through logic. It focuses primarily on Russell, and through it you will gain an understanding about his personality, which will make reading his history of philosophy even more enjoyable. It will allow you to put Russell's words in a historical and biographical context, just as he does for the philosopher's that he critiques. And Logicomix is just a great read in it's own right. ( )

Much as I am fond of Mr. Russell, the book doesn't live up to its title. Renaissance Neo-Platonism is skipped? (for instance) I can understand how it doesn't have any appeal to Mr. Russell, but it was there, and is a part of that history. ( )

A magisterial account of philosophy from the pre-socratics down to John Dewey and the philosophy of logical analysis. Some minor knowledge of philosophy is needed (mainly nomenclature and basic terminology) but this is an excellent introduction to (western) philosophy.

( )

História da filosofia ocidental é uma obra monumental, que inclui muitos dos mais discutidos autores nas diferentes áreas do conhecimento: da lógica às ciências políticas, da economia à antropologia. Bertrand Russell, considerado um dos maiores pensadores dos séculos XIX e XX, reflete de modo muito eclético e espirituoso sobre a filosofia ocidental desde os pré-socráticos até seus dias. Dividido em três volumes, o boxe é inédito no Brasil. Uma obra imperdível tanto para os amantes de filosofia quanto para quem quer conhecer um pouco mais sobre os grandes pensadores da nossa história.

An important point was left out of this book: The history of philosophy is also a history of drunks.

Bertrand Russell has attempted to give a brief overview of the History of Western Philosophy. In this 900 page tome he touches on the major figures, major fields of thought, and the socio-political backgrounds that influenced (and were influenced by) them. Russell also offers up some critique on these aspects, because it wouldn't be a philosophy book if it wasn't doing so.

This description sounds like anathema to entertaining reading, and it would be if it wasn't being tackled by someone like Russell. Bertrand has a very clear, concise, and accessible writing style, and is easily able to explain in plain language even the most complex of philosophical ideas. Normally reading philosophy reminds me of reading genetics textbooks, as it is overstuffed with pedantry and jargon, Russell makes it feel like he is uses no jargon or technical terms.

It should also be noted that Russell is snarky to the point that you find yourself having to laugh and share his comment with someone. His comments are withering and witty, but they also serve as a great way of highlighting the flaws with certain arguments or "great" thinkers. If there are a few takeaway points from this book it is that the great minds were way ahead of their time, but that those same minds were confined by the structures of their time. It makes you wonder how many of today's ideas are going to look silly and biased to future peoples.

This isn't really a book to read about certain philosophers, nor fields of thought. A History of Western Philosophy is more a cliff notes version of several thousand years of thinking. Definitely an emphasis on the history and context. And it is all viewed through Russell's eyes, his snarky, snarky, eyes. ( )

In this wonderfully wide-ranging, intelligent and humane book Russell not only introduces the most important philosophers and philosophies from the ancient Greeks onward (in the Western tradition, that is, he alludes occasionally to oriental traditions where they influence western philosophy, but on the whole they are outside his remit), he gives the historical and social context from which the philosophies rose. I found this to be particularly valuable; my modern mind often has difficulty how some beliefs could have been held, but when Russell explains how it was not only more important for a philosophy to be internally consistent than anything else, but that before the era of modern science so much was unknown about the way the world and the universe worked that it was less clear cut what was feasible and what impossible, I felt I understood a lot more. I will not pretend to have understood all the philosophy herein - I have read very little philosophy, and i think that it is an area that needs a certain frame of mind or a thorough grounding, or possibly both - but putting the various philosophies into both historical context and into a continuum with the ideas on which they were built gave me a far greater understanding than I otherwise would have gained.

Even more important to this is Russell's wonderful style. He describes ideas and events with a clarity and fluidity which is astounding, even if some of the ideas still remain somewhat opaque simply because of their complexity to my way of thinking. He is a joy to read, bringing the historical detail and the lives of the philosophers to three dimensions, and regularly throwing in gems of urbane wit that sometimes had me chuckling out loud. While he describes the ideas, for the most part, with academic disinterest (although never dryly), Russell does not necessarily seek to be unbiased; he is forthright in saying, for example, that he not only disagrees with Nietzsche but dislikes his outlook, his fascination with violence, admiration for conquerors and dismissal of 'trivial' humanity. Russell shows, obliquely, how his own philosophy is driven by a belief in humanity and that, while progress might not be inevitable as the writers of the early industrial age seemed to believe, it can be brought about and sustained by human action. He also, in the closing chapter, points out why philosophy is vital to our understanding while at the same time recognising that it has many shortcomings.

Bertrand Russell had a truly magnificent mind and a privileged education, but even taking this into account, one of the things this book shows is something we seem to have lost in the current world of educating people for a specific vocation; Russell shows, and expects his readers to have, a familiarity not only with the subject on which he is writing, but with history, literature and culture beyond that relatively narrow field. Reading a book like this shows how vitally important that is, that making bridges between isolated subjects can lead to a greater understanding of all of them.

There are flaws, both of which I shall put down to the times in which he was writing;this book was written in the 1940s when Russell was already in his 70s. He lived to be 98. He tends to write that 'men have written' or 'men think' where a more modern writer would say 'people have written' or 'scholars think' (although one of the first modern academics to whom he refer is a woman). The other is in the chapter on the 19th century, when he mentions Darwin. While he does not quite get Darwin's theory right, I think this is largely because he was writing in a time when the theory had become distorted both by social Darwinists and by other bits of superfluous baggage that have been dropped away, and before clinching evidence like DNA was discovered.

A book I will keep close by to listen to again, and get hold of a paper copy so I can pore in more detail over some of the more difficult theories. ( )

Wonderful, accessible survey of western philosophy through the 20th century. ( )

Philosophy and Social Environment
Russell’s account of philosophy is unique and controversial. On can say that he knew it. His exposition, with plenty of appreciation and critics of his own, is sometimes ironic, sometimes sarcastic. He gave to greek philosophy the attention it demands. From that he presented a fair selection of philosophers. He went until John Dewey, his contemporary. In his reflections he tried to situate each philosopher in his social environment and, for that reason, the book contains a good amount of (social) history. This is a great introduction to philosophy and its problems. ( )

I've been working on this for months, which is no big deal because the book has independent sections covering each philosophical epoch and its representative philosophers. Russell is dry but knowledgeable. I'm not a fan of his strict materialism, but he is what he is.

***

7/15/09: Floating on the surface of Saint Augustine's intrigues. A little boring. I'm told that someone of my disposition is better suited to Tarnas's book, The Passion of the Western Mind.

***

9/4/09: Finally finished Book II, Catholic Philosophy. Talk about an oxymoron: if you didn't toe the party line, they burned you at the stake; sometimes they burned you even if you did (particularly if you got in the way of the Pope politically, had a little money or piece of property). The most interesting individual to begin to extricate himself from the medieval morass was John Wycliffe (ca. 1320-84). He was excommunicated in 1366 because he preached "communistic opinions" (i.e., "property is the result of sin; Christ and the Apostles had no property, and the clergy ought to have none." He also denied transubstantiation and passively encouraged The Peasants Revolt of 1381. [p. 485:]). Most importantly, though, is that while his followers were eventually driven underground, "the revolt against the papacy remained in men's thoughts, and prepared the soil for Protestantism." [p. 486:] Ergo, Protestantism is an outcropping of "communistic opinions." Sadly, it has slid into a unique orthodoxy all its own. I am reminded of a quote by André Malraux, "Christ: an anarchist who succeeded. That's all." On to Book III and the Moderns.

***

9/7/09: "Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science." [p. 525:] Francis Bacon died "of a chill caught while experimenting on refrigeration by stuffing a chicken full of snow." [p. 542:] Descartes "was not industrious; he worked short hours, and read little." [p. 560:] Spinoza, my favorite philosopher, is "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers." [p. 569:]

***

10/19/09: Russell has it out for the romantics, particularly Rousseau, and, to a lesser extent, the quasi-romanticism of Nietzsche. But he doesn't seem to appreciate the (necessary?) reaction against materialism. After reading 836 pages on philosophy, I am reminded why I'm a fan of fiction. Theory can spin off into tedious abstractions and only becomes interesting where the rubber-meets-the-road (i.e., political philosophy). Besides, psychology has all the answers anyway, right? ( )

Bertrand Russell is one of my heroes; however, this is far from his best work. Amazingly for him, it manages to be rather ... shallow. Perhaps that is inevitable, given the amount of ground it attempts to cover. ( )

The title says it all.I really enjoyed reading it.I think Russell was stronger on the antiquity part, and weaker on the modern part, which may have required more chapters.Ideal to get a global view of the subject. ( )

In a word: awesome. This book is the best introduction to Western thought (which means: to the Western mind and the way it thinks) that I have yet read. Russell does an excellent job in his choice of subject matter, his explanations of the various philosophies that Westerners have adhered to since the most ancient ones of Greece, and in his evaluations of each of those. He is fair, balanced, insightful, and witty from cover to cover in this book; even when I found myself disagreeing with him, I had to admit that he made a good point and he made it well. The only complaint that I have is that I think he shortchanged much of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, either skipping it entirely or only giving a brief mention to certain individuals and movements that I think had much more importance than he gives credit for. Aside from that, this is a simply amazing book. I recommend it to anyone who wants to familiarize themselves with Western thought and/or better understand their own thinking. ( )

I don't think for a moment that Russell is trying to be fair in this philosophical overview, but it makes for good reading, and he does give you his take on a wide range of philosophical and political issues over this long & detailed trip through the history of philosophy up to his own time. ( )

As a former roommate of mine once indelibly said on the topic of the internet (the internet is my metaphor of choice for this book?), "it's got a lot of stuff on it." This 800-page monster goes right back to Thales, who was "the first philosopher", and right there you can see what one of its essential flaws is going to be. This matter of positivism--it's like, I recognize that talking about concepts like "civilization", say, or "correctness", is complicated, and I'm by no means unwilling to venture out of my relativist fastness (spend most of my time taking the air out on the battlements anyway), but this is a bit much. In part, of course, it's no more than you might expect from the lion of the "secular humanist" movement (the people who don't get that 90% of us are secular humanists and think it means something to be all proclaimin' alla time); in part, it's merely the vagaries of being a famous public philosopher for a long damn time and having to keep up with social and rhetorical currents (I read that somewhere else, in 1929, Russell said that black people shouldn't be exterminated because they work better than white people in the tropics--"apart from questions of humanity"); in third part, though, I think it's an approach Russell would ultimately defend, because he started out as a late Victorian trying to salvage belief in the Absolute through math amid the ripening and loosening of a society. The flip side of the "extermination of Negroes" business, and one which is less easy to chalk up to ephemeral habits of thought and expression, is that he figured it was right for Europeans to colonize North America and any place where they put the land to "better use" than the indigenous inhabitants.

So the guy believes in progress. It seems absurd, since his fundamental conception of philosophy is as "something intermediate between theology and science"--addressing, like theology, areas of human interest about which definite knowledge has not so far been accessible, but assaying, like science, to base its conclusions on reason and evidence rather than revealed truth. (It goes without saying that the boundaries between philosophy and science/theology respectively are going to be fuzzy.) That's a good, practical definition, but I can't see how, ultimately, you can then avoid cleaving away ontology and metaphysics--as well, of course, as things like physics and physiology, over time, on the latter of which Russell would certainly agree with me. He is very good as a historian of these dead letters--Heraclitus on being being flux, say, or Aquinas on cognitive psychology--and to give him his due, even good at drawing connections forward and being suggestive of ways that Heraclitus (e.g.; or, better, Democritus) prefigures the state of our knowledge today.

Where we part ways is on the ontological and metaphysical--theory of knowledge, say, or proofs of the existence of God. In the latter case, Russell would agree that these are not possible, but would also say that this needs to be rigorously proven, which I think totally misreads the nature of belief. (He is beyond, like rational proofs, but still has a lot of time for refuting William James's instrumental argument for God, which must have seemed a lot more necessary in his day. In the former case, he does seem to feel that we are on the verge of great mathematical advances that will dissolve completely problems like the relation of subject and object, or mind and body, and to the degree that I can admit this, I'd say it's empirical science that has achieved those answers, not logic.

But enough--he's a logical positivist, and this book is redolent of. Fine. It's also redolent of TONNES OF INFO, in a much more erudite and cross-allusive style than Wikipedia. I knew a bit about the Pre-Socratics, but nothing at all about Orphism, the mystical Greek brotherhood which helps me close the gulf between Olympian belief and Plato and also to understand the significance of Pythagoras-as-mystic on subsequent philosophy (world of forms!). Great stuff. The chapters on the Hellenistic philosophies maybe hardsell his conviction that thought-systems represent "the" essence of their times a bit--I don't disagree that Stoics and Epicureans and Skeptics and Cynics all performed in their various ways turtling manoeuvres against a declining and uncertain world, but--as evidenced by the complex subsequent history of each of these terms--there's no reason at all to downplay the generative or fecund aspects of these philosophies, no reason to be as goddamn programmatic as Russell all the time about what is and isn't useful. Like, whether we leave ontology and metaphysics behind or not, I think that he and I would agree that the, or a, role of philosophy is in ethics and aesthetics and rhetoric (and, still, teasing at the crevices in the scientific understanding of knowledge and the mind), and if the Hellenistic Four are basically ethical philosophies, then surely somebody who's writing a book about the history of philosophy's relation to its cultural context can have a bit more time for the idea that their systems are as good as ours, and just made for different times? But no, the positivist again rears its head. (By the way, names for four rabbits--don't steal 'em--Pyrrho, Epicurus, Diogenes, and Zeno.)

The stuff on the Church Fathers, again, really good, and hauls me some part of the way back from the sour thoughts I traditionally have about St. Augustine. Good quick investigations of heresies, which are actually kind of a new weird interdisciplinary field all of a sudden in the middle ages--as opposed to being simply persecuted or ignored, they come--the designation of a belief as heretical comes--to grant it a special entity, a multiutility, between philosophy and religion and politics and law. I've forgotten which one now was about how God is better than Christ, and which one was about how Christ has two natures, and which one was about how he has one nature but two substances, and etc., but I do remember that "faith without works is dead" is Pelagianism, because that shit's moral and true.

I come to realize that some of the glazing over I do with certain philosophers isn't because I'm just a stupid; it's cos certain philosophers are just too boring--Kant--or abstruse--Berkeley--for words. (Others, for instance Hegel, are actually fascinatingly weird, as long as you can read Russell telling you about it and never have to crack an actual Hegel book, ew.) I find that the discussion on Descartes takes me only tenuously from the cogito to the actual methodological understanding of rationalism that I hoped to get from the book--like, I get the ultimate contingency of knowledge and the advisability of proceeding from first principles (really I do, I did mushrooms and wrote gibberish about it when I was 19 and took it to my professor's house at 4 in the AM!), but I don't get how you go from there to actually establishing principles to work on in thinking about the mundane world, except with something that looks an awful lot like just an asterisked empiricism.

With Locke, there is a valuable discussion of how he was responding to the divine right of kings as expressed by one Thomas Filmer, that can be easily used to bolster my discussion of his work on language in my thesis--as there is no intrinsic chain of command in human affairs, necessitating a social contract, so there is no intrinsic chain of meaning in speech, necessitating a compact bestowing meaning on arbitrary signs. With Leibniz, all I know is monads sound adorable and I want to eat them up, yum! With Spinoza, I want to eat him up, because he sounds like a dear soul.

I don't mean to imply by leaving anyone out (I am leaving out many) that they are not covered--he walks us through Rousseau, with scorn; through Hume, who comes across like a ghost in the machine of ultimate probabilism and relativism, a predeconstructionist; through the utilitarians, with nothing new to say; and through a chapter on Byron that rather idiosyncratically traces a lineage from him through Fichte and Nietzsche to Hitler. (You get what he was going for, of course, and it's a good bracing reminder that nobody writing in 1943 saw Nietzsche as a prophet of fierce joy like the scholarly types do today.) Up against that call-it-Dionysian, irrational German Idealist revolt against the empirical, he puts a Apollonian, rationalistic revolt that starts with Smith and Ricardo, goes through Marx, and ends up in Stalin--a framework that Slavoj Zizek would make hay with and that does leave you thinking about how far we can separate these philosophers of the optimistic 19th century from their appropriations in the dark 20th--not to condemn them, not even thinking that concentration camps and gulags are anywhere in Nietzsche's or Marx's thought, but just to keep in mind the potential for misuse (all true of liberal philosophy too, of course, and still going on).

The last few chapters are more speculative--the stuff on Bergson, whom I wasn't familiar with, is interesting; his metaphor for life, as a "shell that bursts into pieces that are themselves shells", and his action-model, make me think of Deleuze in the illogic of their metaphor-delving approach, only a dynamic Deleuze that wants to punch you in the face kinda. How accurate that is, I don't know, but certainly by the end Russell has roughly sketched out the contours of 20th-century analytic and continental philosophy, in all their pedantic and spurious respective glories. There is also "neutral monism", which if I knew more about it might just show me that there is still a place for a philosophy-type model of inquiry/perception/experience, as merely one form of interaction between materials. There's a lot of stuff in this book, and you don't need more than a medium dash of healthy skepticism (not Pyrrho's kind!) to avoid Russell's biases leading you down the garden path. ( )

Wonderful writing telling us about the essence of Western philosophy and philosophers. I paid the equivalent of $5 CDN in China for this softcover volume.

Important and inspiring. I actually listened to the audio book, which took a week. And to my surprise, at the end of each day I found myself reluctant to turn it off. In gulping it down so quickly I think I was able to see big picture more clearly than if i had read it slowly and focused the individual philosophies. Russel is eloquent, easy to understand and engaging. One leaves this book inspired with a deep desire for more, which is clearly the author's intent. ( )