About this title: This comprehensive work presents the history of Western philosophy in its social, economic and political context, enlivened by Bertrand Russell's profound and lucid insight and wit.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Simon and Schuster, New York
Date Published: 1945
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Good, In good dust jacket. xxiii, 895 p., 1 l. 23 cm. At head of title: Bertrand Russell. "Originally designed and partly delivered as lectures at the Barnes foundation in Pennsylvania. "--Pref. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Date Published: 1965
Description: Good. 1965 Simon & Schuster pub. Thick Softcover. Moderate wear. No marks in text. Prior owner name inside. Small corner missing off of cover. Ship same or next day. More Russell books in our store. read more
Edition: First edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Simon and Schuster, New York
Date Published: 1945
Description: Good. No dust jacket. Boards show some soiling and corner curling. Small moisture stain on top age ends near spine. Right side page ends show light foxing. Prev. owner's name on f.e.p. No markings to text, solid binding. xxiii, 895 p., 1 l. 23 cm. At head of title: Bertrand Russell. "Originally designed and partly delivered as lectures at the Barnes foundation in Pennsylvania. "--Pref. read more
Edition: Reprint
Binding: Hardback
Publisher: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London
Date Published: 1955
Description: Octavo Size. Good condition. No dustjacket. Boards 'grubby' with insect damage, marks and darkened spine. Internally sound and clean.916 pages. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Date Published: 1961
ISBN-13:9780041090086ISBN:004109008X
Description: Good. Cover type-This book is a paperback copy. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Simon and Schuster, New York
Date Published: 1945
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Paperback! ! ! Page Tanning! ! ! xxiii, 895 p., 1 l. 23 cm. At head of title: Bertrand Russell. "Originally designed and partly delivered as lectures at the Barnes foundation in Pennsylvania. "--Pref. Same Day Shipping! ! ! Ship from CA. (B8) read more
Binding: Cloth
Publisher: Readers Union with Allen & Unwin, London
Date Published: 1954
Description: Good+/Good- Good+ Hardback. Good-dust jacket is sunned with 2 small tape mends. Some wear to the spine & corners. Previous owner's name printed on front flap & signature on inside of front board. Clean copy. 916p. read more
Binding: Cloth
Publisher: George Allen & Unwin
Date Published: 1961
Description: Good in Good jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Good condition volume in worn d/j torn in 2 places. Page edges tanned to top edge. Internally clean and free from annotation. Good solid copy. Additional shipping costs will be requested from buyers outside Australia. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: SIMON AND SCHUSTER
Date Published: 1945
ISBN-13:9781399234078ISBN:1399234072
Description: Very Good. Tight binding, clean pages, book is in excellent condition but missing DJ, Free Delivery Confirmation IN STOCK IMMEDIATE SHIPPING. read more
Edition: 2nd printing.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: New York, Simon and Schuster
Date Published: 1945
Description: Description: xxiii, 895 p., 1 l. 23 cm. Subjects: Philosophy--History. Notes: At head of title: Bertrand Russell. "Originally designed and partly delivered as lectures at the Barnes foundation in Pennsylvania. "--Pref. Near fine copy in the original gilt-blocked cloth. Slightest suggestion only of dust-dulling to the spine bands and panel edges. Remains particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong. 1. pp. 895. read more
Edition: 2nd printing.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: New York, Simon and Schuster
Date Published: 1945
Description: Description: xxiii, 895 p., 1 l. 23 cm. Subjects: Philosophy--History. Notes: At head of title: Bertrand Russell. "Originally designed and partly delivered as lectures at the Barnes foundation in Pennsylvania. "--Pref. Near fine copy in the original gilt-blocked cloth. Slightest suggestion only of dust-dulling to the spine bands and panel edges. Remains particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Date Published: 1964
Description: Good. Clean text, moderate shelf and edge wear, tanning and foxing to page edges. We are a Christian owned bookstore and a portion of all proceeds helps support Christian missions. read more
Description: Fair. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Shipped quickly. Hardcover. Used, acceptable. Dust jacket has small tears/bends on edges. Cover has some edge wear. No dust jacket. read more
"A good and often entertaining overview of the whole of Western philosophy, from the Presocratics down to John Dewey and logical analysis. My only criticism is that he's unfairly harsh, as an atheist, to the mediaeval Scholastics, who I rather like and admire. If it wasn't for the Aquinases and the John of Ockhams there probably wouldn't be the Bertrand Russels. Also, like many of his generation, he suffers from a bad dose of intellectual pride. This was probably why Wittgenstein said of him that as a mathematician he was unrivalled, but as a philosopher he was best avoided."
"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."
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