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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
An exceedingly impressive piece of scholarly work. Grayling lays out dense, often obscure ideas in a structured and largely accessible way that invites you to engage with the material. This book offers a fairly comprehensive view of the "big names" in philosophy - primarily metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and ethics - starting from Thales; it presupposes no background in philosophy, nor does it wander into theology or what we now consider science (but for much of history was also included under the umbrella of philosophy). The sections on Western philosophy are much more in-depth than those on non-Western ones, as that's where Grayling's expertise lies, but the book as a whole offers a compelling entry point and invites further studying. It does take a little while to get through, and significantly longer if you really want to retain what Grayling writes, but I firmly think it's worth the effort.
informative
slow-paced
Reading this is like drinking the ocean through a straw. Enjoyed learning it but will only remember a feeling of it and some fractured declarative information.
I am slowly working my way through this one and finding it an excellent and highly readable survey of philosophy in all its dimensions. I especially appreciate the inclusion of Asian, Southeast Asian, Persian/Arabic philosophical traditions. The writing is scholarly, engrossing and often witty. It's unfortunately too long for my freshman students in the philosophy survey course, but I've ordered it for my college library and the local public library.
Thank you for the eARC from Edelweiss for review.
Thank you for the eARC from Edelweiss for review.
intellectual grazing food. varied, small individual pieces, yet rich and filling in aggregate. kept me going for weeks.
Basically an updated version of Bertrand Russell’s work.
A masterful completion of a very ambitious project. Grayling manages to cover over two thousand years of western philosophy in a succinct and understandable way. As well as short but enlightening surveys of Indian, Chinese and Arabic philosophy.
Now when I hear of see a philosopher's name I know where and when they were from and at least one of their main ideas. Philosophy seems a lot less mysterious now and the geographic and historical context that each philosopher and their ideas gets put into is very helpful.
Pretty nice overview of the subject for the length. For those wanting to go even deeper after this, I recommend the iconic Copleston History of Philosophy.
The good stuff:
-Pretty nice capsule-sized summaries of significant thinkers and movements.
-Some major sections that inevitably run out of space end up quickly listing the names of other related philosophers, which is the next best thing to a "full" inclusion in the tome, and provide more jumping-off points for folks to take their research further. My only complaint is that not all sections consistently include this list.
-Lots of ideas made pretty clear and succinct, using a lot of the original lingo and analogies from the original texts.
-The book is a nice reminder to re-educate those already somewhat familiar with philosophy, though the more unfamiliar sections are often too succinct to understand some concepts. Though with the space restraints, it does a pretty good job! The concepts should be enough to whet the appetite of anyone wanting to delve deeper into any particular area or thinker.
-A nice first attempt at giving some space to non-western traditions. I think western philosophy is now just starting to open up to this sort of approach, so I think future histories of philosophy will be able to draw out more points of comparison as more research is made.
The bad stuff:
-The hardcover tome is huge and a little uncomfortable (this is from someone who just read Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which is similar but actually a bit smaller!). When the paperback version of this book is released, I would love if it were split into two or more books. The size of the Oxford's Very Short Introductions book (many of which are listed in the footnotes) is a nice goal.
-Speaking of Kierkegaard, unfortunately he is omitted from the main text, but he's still mentioned three times in connection with later philosophy, as a sort of ripple effect (he also had a here-unmentioned affect on thinkers such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein). I don't mind that so much, since intelligent readers can see Kierkegaard's effect like waves in a pond and not need to me explicitly told that something interesting was dropped into the middle of the waves, and readers who are interested can investigate further. But in one of these explicit later mentions, Grayling takes the time to again defend the exclusion of Kierkegaard and other thinkers, placing them squarely in the "religious camp" and thus safely being able to "bracket them out" (borrowing an expression from the Husserl section). The problem with this is that a lot of non-religious readers get a lot out of Kierkegaard, and though I agree that Christianity is inseparable from Kierkegaard as a thinker, a lot of his philosophy, particularly explained in his Postscript, is a reaction against objective/scientific thinking and how it leaves out the "single individual" and how one ought to live. At the very least, he is regarded as the first existentialist thinker, and so maybe deserved a few sentences to setup some of the discussion of existentialism in the 20th century..
-The constant railing against religion is tiring - I feel like Grayling should have issued a fatwa against religion early on and then dropped it. But railing against it is a repeated focus throughout the book, following in the footsteps of Russell, who has a clear axe to grind. It seems that he's either obsessed with attacking religion, or religion plays a bigger and more interesting part in the history of philosophy than he's wanting to admit. I suspect it's a bit of both. Of course a lot of this may just be my biases rubbing up against Graylin's biases. Maybe some folks are into it and I'm not, but it just got to feel like constant proselytizing. At the end of the book, Grayling boils philosophy down to two questions: 1) what is there and 2) what matters?. No surprise that religion butts head with philosophy, because it is also trying to answer these same overarching questions. But admittedly, Western philosophy really did start when the presocratics turned away from explaining these questions with religion, and instead turned toward reason. I could see how reintroducing religion seems like sneaking back in the gods from that pre-philosophic time - Zeus and the rest of the them.
-The section on Analytic Philosophy is disproportionately larger (~130 pages) than the other sections. It's no secret that this is Grayling's bread and butter, but for folks who aren't as enamored of analytic philosophy may find this section a bit of a slog. Another reason for the length is recency, and as Grayling himself implies, as time moves on some of the more recent thinkers will be winnowed out. I suppose some time in the future, Analytic Philosophy may take up the same space as Medieval Philosophy, at around 30 pages. But for now it is 130 pages.
The good stuff:
-Pretty nice capsule-sized summaries of significant thinkers and movements.
-Some major sections that inevitably run out of space end up quickly listing the names of other related philosophers, which is the next best thing to a "full" inclusion in the tome, and provide more jumping-off points for folks to take their research further. My only complaint is that not all sections consistently include this list.
-Lots of ideas made pretty clear and succinct, using a lot of the original lingo and analogies from the original texts.
-The book is a nice reminder to re-educate those already somewhat familiar with philosophy, though the more unfamiliar sections are often too succinct to understand some concepts. Though with the space restraints, it does a pretty good job! The concepts should be enough to whet the appetite of anyone wanting to delve deeper into any particular area or thinker.
-A nice first attempt at giving some space to non-western traditions. I think western philosophy is now just starting to open up to this sort of approach, so I think future histories of philosophy will be able to draw out more points of comparison as more research is made.
The bad stuff:
-The hardcover tome is huge and a little uncomfortable (this is from someone who just read Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which is similar but actually a bit smaller!). When the paperback version of this book is released, I would love if it were split into two or more books. The size of the Oxford's Very Short Introductions book (many of which are listed in the footnotes) is a nice goal.
-Speaking of Kierkegaard, unfortunately he is omitted from the main text, but he's still mentioned three times in connection with later philosophy, as a sort of ripple effect (he also had a here-unmentioned affect on thinkers such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein). I don't mind that so much, since intelligent readers can see Kierkegaard's effect like waves in a pond and not need to me explicitly told that something interesting was dropped into the middle of the waves, and readers who are interested can investigate further. But in one of these explicit later mentions, Grayling takes the time to again defend the exclusion of Kierkegaard and other thinkers, placing them squarely in the "religious camp" and thus safely being able to "bracket them out" (borrowing an expression from the Husserl section). The problem with this is that a lot of non-religious readers get a lot out of Kierkegaard, and though I agree that Christianity is inseparable from Kierkegaard as a thinker, a lot of his philosophy, particularly explained in his Postscript, is a reaction against objective/scientific thinking and how it leaves out the "single individual" and how one ought to live. At the very least, he is regarded as the first existentialist thinker, and so maybe deserved a few sentences to setup some of the discussion of existentialism in the 20th century..
-The constant railing against religion is tiring - I feel like Grayling should have issued a fatwa against religion early on and then dropped it. But railing against it is a repeated focus throughout the book, following in the footsteps of Russell, who has a clear axe to grind. It seems that he's either obsessed with attacking religion, or religion plays a bigger and more interesting part in the history of philosophy than he's wanting to admit. I suspect it's a bit of both. Of course a lot of this may just be my biases rubbing up against Graylin's biases. Maybe some folks are into it and I'm not, but it just got to feel like constant proselytizing. At the end of the book, Grayling boils philosophy down to two questions: 1) what is there and 2) what matters?. No surprise that religion butts head with philosophy, because it is also trying to answer these same overarching questions. But admittedly, Western philosophy really did start when the presocratics turned away from explaining these questions with religion, and instead turned toward reason. I could see how reintroducing religion seems like sneaking back in the gods from that pre-philosophic time - Zeus and the rest of the them.
-The section on Analytic Philosophy is disproportionately larger (~130 pages) than the other sections. It's no secret that this is Grayling's bread and butter, but for folks who aren't as enamored of analytic philosophy may find this section a bit of a slog. Another reason for the length is recency, and as Grayling himself implies, as time moves on some of the more recent thinkers will be winnowed out. I suppose some time in the future, Analytic Philosophy may take up the same space as Medieval Philosophy, at around 30 pages. But for now it is 130 pages.