Readable and Insightful
Durant has a gift for explaining complex philosophical ideas simply and for writing in an entertaining fashion. He also has an intriguing approach to the field. Instead of writing encyclopedically, he picks a half dozen philosophers as representative of 2000 years of philosophy.
The jump from Plato and Aristotle to Francis Bacon, however, hardly does justice to the philosophical life of man during the 1000 years of the "Dark Ages." Durant too easily falls into the conceit of writing off the Middle Ages as a time of barbarism and backwardness. I'm more inclined to write off Rome as barbaric and to view the rise of a Christian Europe as having a far more salutary and civilizing effect on man. How is it possible to write the story of Western philosophy without acknowledging the indispensable role of Christ and the scholastics?
Durant should have jumped from Aristotle to Christ and then to Aquinas and Ockham.
Durant does spend a few passages on the Middle Ages, characterizing the theocracy of the day as a realization of the philosopher kings of Plato's republic. It's a striking thesis, though it reveals what is perhaps the ulimate fallacy of Durant's approach -- that ideas determine social structure as opposed to the other way around. The faith-based intelligentsia of the Middles Ages was particularly well suited to the secular hierarchies and power structures of the day.
I was skeptical of Durant's choice of Spinoza as such a pivotal philosopher, but Durant's argument is ultimately persuasive. Spinoza does square the circle of religion and science by reconciling the two and Durant is probably right to conclude that Spinoza defined modern thinking on this issue. Equating God with nature and with Newton's laws is a thoroughly modern approach, as is the tendency toward determinism and a healthy skepticism for organized religion.
I'm not convinced by the primacy he gives Bacon. Although not strictly a philosopher, Isaac Newton was the great mind of his day and had more influence on shaping modern notions of science than did Bacon. Also, Durant's decision to write off the British empiricists and the study of epistemology as not being "real" philosophy is hard to justify.
His choice of Voltaire as the embodiment of the Enlightenment and the shift to modern thinking about religion and society, and his contrasting of Voltaire with Rousseau, is excellent.
This is a worthwhile and interesting book.
Philosophy 101
This Audio CD is the first half of Durant's 1947 revised edition of "The Story of Philosophy" a book originally published in 1927. Not only has the text aged well, the narrator reads it well. Durant waxes a trifle poetical at times, but he delivers the goods.
The book works chronologically through the history of philosophy, summarizing much, but stopping to give the biographies (and synopses of the thought) of all whom Durant considers major philosophers. Along the way the auditor learns some interesting tidbits: E.g. Darwin wasn't the first to conceive of evolution by natural selection. That honor belongs to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Empedocles.
The philosophers whom Durant profiles are a who's who in the pantheon of thinkers:
Chapter I: Plato
Chapter II: Aristotle
Chapter III: Bacon
Chapter IV: Spinoza
Chapter V: Voltaire
Chapters VI-X are set forth in Volume II of this audiobook, "The Story of Philosophy: From Kant to William James and the American Pragmatists." If you have a CD with MP3 capacity, you might rather buy the entire book in that format.
Durant later, in "The Lessons of History," lamented the fact that he overlooked the scholastics, and his omission of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas constitutes the greatest weakness of the work. Durant atoned for slighting Aquinas in "The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time" by ranking him as one of history's 10 most influential thinkers.
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