Description:
This book is no less than a guide to the whole of Western philosophy -- the ideas that have undergirded our civilization for two-and-a-half thousand years. Anthony Kenny tells the story of philosophy from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment into the modern world. He introduces us to the great thinkers and their ideas, starting with Plato, Aristotle, and the other founders of Western thought. In the second part of the book he takes us through a thousand years of medieval philosophy, and shows us the rich intellectual legacy of Christian thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, and Ockham. Moving into the early modern period, we explore the great works of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant, which remain essential reading today. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein again transformed the way we see the world.
Review Quotes: "Kenny's authoritative work, compiling four volumes, is the finest single-author history of Western philosophy since Frederick Copleston- a Herculean task executed with erudition and entertainment. From the dream of the ancient Greeks to the deconstruction of postmodernists, he accessibly treats the major branches of philosophy: ethics, politics, religion, epistemology, language, metaphysics, aesthetics, and logic. --Christopher, Benson --First Things