This book should be in every library
This is a wonderful history of great thinkers as well as a brilliantly-written masterpiece in its own right.
superb
I love this book. He give an overview of philosophic thought but puts each story in the context of their environment. It's great for those who want a sampler plate without gorging on one thinker. Plus it's small so it's a great travellers book.
Durant likes his women young--and his philosophers old...
This is a good book which you--if you have any interest in philosophy--should read. Durant is a fine (albeit opinionated) writer, and the philosophers he selects for illumination are treated with scholarly respect and no (except for Spinoza) hagiography. Durant's critiques never range into unfair territory, even when he confronts philosophers who disparage views--such as socialism--which he, Durant, holds dear.
There are a few typos and factual errors (viz. Durant's assertion on page 411 that Wagner was "half-Semitic"), but the book overall has a nice organic flow, and some essential hand-holding when Kant and other obscurantist Teutons are examined.
There are numerous conspicuous absences from amongst the more famous practitioners of philosophizing ("space forbids" as Durant sheepishly admits), and one who wants the WHOLE enchilada should acquire a copy of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. If you peek into that and your hair turns gray, however, The Story of Philosophy may be the set of training-wheels which will enable you to ride Russell's more formidable and scholarly work.
The good, the bad, and the categorical imperative...
*The Story of Philosophy* is a clearly written, entertaining, and illuminating survey of the major movements in western thought from Socrates to Santayana, from Aristotle to American pragmatism. Given its easy colloquial style, it's easy to overlook that this book was originally written in the mid-1920s. But one should be aware that this means there's nothing here about existentialism, structuralism, post-modernism, etc.--the story ends with John Dewey. Still what is here is presented with a light tough, colored with the author's characteristic wry humor and everyman bonhomie.
As befitting a general survey of philosophy, Durant doesn't plunge too deeply into the issues touched on in this book; but he's not entirely superficial either. What you get is each philosopher's most characteristic speculations on the big questions of life and how they fit into the overall "story" of human thought. Durant has a gift for making the complex and obscure comprehensible to the layman. Anyone who can summarize Kantian metaphysics in a handful of forthright pages and trim away all the fanciful theoretical falderal from the Hegels of the philosophical world are certainly to be commended--and appreciated. Perhaps what's best--and most enlivens this book--is the wealth of anecdote about the personal lives of these semi-mythical titans of thought. It's easy to forget that these big brains were housed in flesh-and-blood bodies subject to the same fears, prejudices, diseases, desires, and disappointments as the rest of us--and that these all-too-human factors played a significant role in their subsequent philosophy.
On occasion, Durant lets his own prejudices get unduly in the way of presenting the ideas of his philosophical protagonists--especially when any philosopher such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Spenser takes a particularly dark view of life or suggests that it may not, all in all, be worth living. Durant seems to feel it incumbent upon him to combat such negativity with a most unwelcome--to me, anyway--sunnyside-up rebuttal complete with the sort of Hallmarkian-style platitudes the more pessimistic among us have been groaning at since high school and find even *more* depressing than the hopelessness of which they were meant to relieve us. Yes, it's wonderful to hear birds singing, to watch children at play--sunrises, sunsets, and a good pork chop can all be a delight that inspires one to poetry; but are they worth the cancers, the wars, the car wrecks, the funerals of friends and loved ones, the catheters, the senility, the probes, the colonoscopies, the morphine drip, the casket, urn, or mausoleum we're all destined for when all's said and done? One can, in all rationality and good faith, without being the victim of a fit of childish peevishness, disenchanted idealism, or lack of maternal affection say no, no it's really not worth it, I'm stuck here yes and must make the best of it and enjoy what I can, still, all the same, thanks but no thanks, I'll pass, I wish I'd never been born.
Anyway, if you can ignore Durant's annoying proclivity to pedestrian peptalks and middle-of-the-road pedantry and aren't looking for "the rest of the story" of philosophy after the turn of the 20th century, than this general survey is definitely worth the while of those who want a sound introduction to the major figures of the western philosophical tradition.
Compilation of great philosophers
I was reading this book while I'm on my vacation and to my surprise, I've fall in love with philosophy instantaneously. After all this years, I didn't know that I have shared the same dogma as the world's greatest philosophers. This book is a great introduction for those who are keen on philosophy or simply wanted to gain knowledge about the history of philosophy.
(80 reviews)
