About this title: First published in 1946, History of Western Philosophy went on to become the best-selling philosophy book of the twentieth century. A dazzlingly ambitious project, it remains unchallenged to this day as the ultimate introduction to Western philosophy. Providing a sophisticated overview of the ideas that have perplexed people from time immemorial, Russell's History of Western Philosophy offered a cogent precis of its subject. Of course this cannot be the only reason it ended up the best-selling philosophy book of the twentieth century. Russell's book was 'long on wit, intelligence and ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: Reprint
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, New York
Date Published: 1972
ISBN-13:9780671201586ISBN:0671201581
Description: Fine. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. $24.00 Publishers Cover Price, 895 Pages, A Color Photograph of a Long Winding Road is Pictured on the Front Cover, This Edition Looks to be From the 2000's or Late 1990's. read more
Edition: Nineteenth Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Simon and Schuster, New York
Description: Near Fine. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Cream Colored Cloth Boards with Gold Lettering to the Spine, 895 Pages, Bertrand Russells Facsimile Autograph on the Bttom Edge of the Front Cover, Tightly Hinged with No Owners Markings. read more
Edition: Sixteenth Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Simon and Schuster, N Y
Description: Very Good- in Very Good- jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Has light wear, DJ lightly soiled and chipping, DJ spine faded, Internally Clean. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Date Published: 1945-01-01
Description: Good. Simon and Schuster [Published date: 1945]. Hard cover, 895 pp. Fifteenth printing. Good+ in fair dust jacket. Dark cloth covered boards with gold lettering on front and spine. Light rubbing and bumping along edges. Binding tight. Pages a bit yellowed but otherwise clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has several 1/2" or less chips and tears and light creasing along the edges. Moderate overall soiling, yellowing, rubbing and scratching. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival quality Brodart ... read more
Edition: Ninteenth Printing
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1945
ISBN-13:9780671201586ISBN:0671201581
Description: Good Plus. No Jacket. 8 1/4 X 5 1/4. 895 pages, indexed. Pages are tight, clear and clean, browning. Binding firm and straight. Back cover corners 1/4 inch clipped, cover, spine, and edges +. If needed for reference, research, analysis, lucubration, dissertation or just enjoyment this is the one. No conspicuous wear. read more
Edition: 37th printing
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; A Touchstone Book, New York
Date Published: 1967
ISBN-13:9780671201586ISBN:0671201581
Description: Very Good. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. xxiii, 895 pp., bib. notes, index; 21 cm. Firm binding, gently creased spine. Clean inside copy. read more
Edition: 18th Printing
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Touchstone
Date Published: 1945
Description: VG. Oversize paperback, reprint of 1945 edition. Hole punch on front cover, slight dampstain rear endpapers, but does not affect text; book bright square and clear with general wear. An excellent reading copy of 897 pages. read more
Description: Very Good. 1945, Paperback. Twelfth Edition (1966) Seemingly unread, with clean, mark-free pages. Used-Very Good Hall Street Books Proudly ships all books from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours M-F. 100% Money-Back Guarantee and No-Worry return policy. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Touchstone Books
Date Published: 1967-10-30
ISBN-13:9780671201586ISBN:0671201581
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780671201586. read more
"The hyperbolic praise lavished by numerous reviewers on Russell's shmarmy tome is inexplicable. Perhaps readers confuse the book's powers to entertain with accuracy. Granted, the witty Bertrand has penned a "page-turner" as numerous reviewers have opined. It is marred only by its grotesque distortions and frequent factual errors.
Russell displays the flamboyant condescension for post-Kantian philosophy of France and Germany all-too-common of the self-anointed High Church of analytic philosophy. Like most of the arch critics of this tradition, he shows himself with every line to possess a complete ignorance of the history, methods, and goals of this trajectory of philosophy. His Hegel is a ponderous strawman, and his Nietzsche is a cartoonish villain who espouses the precise opposite of what the actual man passionately advocated throughout his work. It would be a comical distortion were it not taken by so many as reliable.
Russell is at his worst in this arena, but in all eras and modalities he attempts to reduce complex sets of arguments to pithy theses which he can embrace or dispatch forthwith, as though the underlying fabric of human experience boils down to a manageable set of easily articulated postulates. This is useful for argumentation but not much else, and it extrudes the subtleties and insights of the ages through the razor-sharp fine-grained filter of his analytical instruments.
Set aside this collection of caricatures and peer into the history of philosophy for yourself, and you will be much better off."
""Philosophy, for Plato, is a kind of vision, the 'vision of truth'...Everyone who has done any kind of creative work has experienced, in a greater or less degree, the state of mind in which, after long labour, truth or beauty appears, or seems to appear, in a sudden glory - it may only be about some small matter, or it may be about the universe. I think that most of the best creative work, in art, in science, in literature, and in philosophy, has been a result of just such a moment."
"Ages of prolonged uncertainty, while they are compatible with the highest degree of saintliness in a few, are inimical to the prosaic every-day virtues of respectable citizens. There seems no use in thrift, when tomorrow all your savings may be dissipated; no advantage in honesty, when the man towards whom you practise it is pretty sure to swindle you; no point in steadfast adherence to the cause, when no cause is important or has a chance of stable victory; no argument in favour of truthfulness, when only supple tergiversation makes the preservation of life and fortune possible. The man whose virtue has no source except a purely terrestrial prudence will in such a world, become an adventurer if he has the courage, and, if not, will seek obscurity as a timid time-server."
"Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism The Messiah = Marx The Elect = The Proletariat The Church = The Communist Party The Second Coming = The Revolution Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth"
"The ancient world found an end to anarchy in the Roman Empire, but the Roman Empire was a brute fact, not an idea. The Catholic world sought an end to anarchy in the church, which was an idea, but was never adequately embodied in fact. Neither the ancient nor the medieval solution was satisfactory - the one because it could not be idealized, the other because it could not be actualized. The modern world, at present, seems to be moving towards a solution like that of antiquity: a social order imposed by force, representing the will of the powerful rather than the hopes of the common men. The problem of a durable and satisfactory social order can only be solved by combining the solidarity of the Roman Empire with the idealism of St. Augustine's City of God. To achieve this a new philosophy will be needed"
"The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense"
"Noone has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consistent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true. There is no reason to suppose that a self-consistent system contains more truth than one which, like Locke's, is more or less wrong."
"We may say, in a broad way, that Greek philosophy down to Aristotle expresses the mentality appropriate to the City State; that Stoicism is appropriate to a cosmopolitan despotism; that stochastic philosophy is an intellectual expression of the Church as an organization; that philosophy since Descartes, or at any rate since Locke, tends to embody the prejudices of the commercial middle class; and that Marxism and Fascism are the philosophies appropriate to the modern industrial state."
"A philosopher who uses his professional competence for anything other except a disinterested search for truth is guilty of a kind of treachery.""
"This is a remarkable book. Over the years I have found various reasons to look into it now and again, but have never read the whole thing. Mostly I've read the bits about particular philosophers: Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Marx for example. I hadn't realised that 'dipping' in this way was missing much of the point of the book.
This is not just a history of Western Philosophy, but also a bit of a 'how do all of the main schools of Western Philosophy fit into their culture and times'. So, much time is spent giving thumb-nail sketches of the history of certain periods in a way that will help the student of philosophy understand where philosophers were coming from when they said such bizarre things as: nothing changes, everything changes, everything is fire, everything is water, matter does not exist, mind does not exist, and so on.
He makes some truly fascinating points in this book - not least that there is no philosophy that is wholly logically consistent and that sometimes the danger is when a philosopher seeks to remain logically consistent rather than acknowledge the horrendous conclusions that the logical consistency of his ideas forces him toward. I use the male pronoun not simply because Russell also uses it throughout, but because all of the philosophers discussed sport a Y-chromosome.
The book is divided into three parts: Ancient Philosophy, Catholic Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. It was written during the Second World War and I think this shows in part, particularly when Russell is discussing the merits of some philosophers - not least Nietzsche and Marx. I had thought that I would find the middle section on Catholics the least interesting - I believe that we 'moderns' feel we have much more in common with Ancients than we do with the Catholic scholastics of the dark and middle ages - but Russell is very kind to these philosophers, although in the main I found them to be little more than pedants adding Christian footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. Perhaps, in another life, I will have time to read one or two of them and see if my attitude changes.
This is not a book that requires either an extensive knowledge of philosophy, nor an extensive knowledge of history to be understood. Russell is a remarkably clear writer (something that for a philosopher really is worth commenting on and something that deserves the highest praise). He also is occasionally quite amusing. Now, I know that people who follow either Marx, Kant, Hegel, Dewey, Nietzsche or even Aristotle might find quite a few things to say in disagreement with Mr Russell, but that in no way takes away from the value of this book. I've listened to a Teaching Company 'Great Ideas In Philosophy' course which covered all of the philosophers discussed here, and I think Russell does at least as good a job as was done there. Invaluable is a word that is grossly overused on this site - particularly by me - but I do think this book gives an invaluable helicopter view of the history of Western Philosophy that is both accessible and often profound.
I once received my lowest mark in my degree for saying pretty much what Russell says here about his mate Dewey - I am rather proud of the fact that I've only discovered our shared view now - twenty years later. I've always found Instrumentalism (otherwise known as Pragmatism) a thoroughly unsatisfactory philosophical standpoint, despite both James and Dewey seeming to be nice enough people in themselves. My main problem with the total rejection of the possibility of any sense that there might be 'truth' (which Russell, as might be expected, confines to logical statements) has always had a bit of a smell about it. When I said this in a class paper at Uni I was nearly lynched by both the lecturer (a declared Instrumentalist) and the other students (who knew better than I which side their bread was buttered). I think Russell's arguments in this section are similar to the ones I tried to make, but are made in a way that is infinitely clearer than I was capable of at the time - a time when I was keen to seem very 'philosophic' ie, totally unclear. Essentially, I've always thought that to move away from discussing the 'truth' of statements and to instead consider their 'efficacy' is a slippery slope and one that can all too easily bring us to splash down into logical and moral difficulties.
His discussion of Bergson's philosophy was enough to ensure I will never read anything by Bergson. I find irrationalism dull and, what is even worse, mind-numbingly 'poetic' in the very worst sense of that word. Sometimes one needs to be obscure because what you are trying to say does not allow you to be immediately clear. However, as Russell displays so beautifully in this book, that is rarely really necessary and the onus is on the writer to make it clear why being turgid or obscure to the point of impenetrability is in either the interests of the reader or the writer.
What is best about this book is that it has inspired me to read some more Plato (I started his complete dialogues some time ago, but things got in the way.) Russell's discussion of Socrates and his relationship to Plato is worth reading the book on its own. Plato is a fascinating character, not least because it seems a case can be made that he became increasingly less convinced of his theory of forms as his dialogues went on. Given that this is the core of his system, this would seem somewhat of a problem.
The book ends by saying that a consistent philosophy that takes into consideration Quantum Theory is still to be written - as little as I know of modern philosophy, I would imagine the intervening 60 years have done little to correct this want. Quantum Theory still remains an enigma and all too often leaves the door wide open for all types of very silly ideas.
This is a book that repays the effort of reading it - it is not a short introduction by any means (being over 800 pages), but it is only a difficult read when he discusses philosophers like Hegel and Bergson who are notoriously difficult anyway. For what this book sets out to do - pretty much, give the average reader an overview of Western Philosophical thought and its place within Western Culture and History, it does a remarkable job. Although I still think it is very handy as a ready reference on a great many philosophers - it is much better, as I've found, to have read it all first."
"Russell tells us that,"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand." That being said, let me utter another warning. Since I sometimes describe myself as an "old-fashioned Bertrand Russell agnostic," you may choose to take both my description of his work and my enthusiasm for it guardedly. As erudite, complete and witty as it is easy to read, this is a one volume college eduction in western philosophy -- up to 1945 (when Russell wrote it). The pre-Socratics, Aristotle and Plato, Jewish Philosophy, St. Augustine, The Middle Ages, Machiavelli, Hook, Hume, Marx, Logical Analysis;-- they are all here, and everything in-between too. Perfect gift for the educated someone who has everything else"
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