History of Western Philosophy (Routledge Classics)

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You hardly need to spend time scanning the reviews for Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy to know it’s a good book. That history helps to explain what an ever-changing language has obscured and reveals criticisms that remain to be addressed. 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. As I said above, it's not that he has biases that is bad, it's that they affect his work and take away some credibility. And although it may not cover every philosopher to have raised their head (particularly twentieth-century ones), it certainly covers all the major philosophers that anyone would care to know about.

This is not to say that a history of Western philosophy should be all adulation, but it should never be exclusive.Just as we have authors today writing to make the most esoteric physics accessible to the layman through intelligent precis and analogy, Russell appears to have been a populist of his time. Nietzsche is the best example of Russell's thesis that philosophers put forward philosophies that they cannot themselves live up. For Russell, ideas don't exist in a vacuum, and the philosophers who expressed these ideas were as much influenced by their times as vice versa. Full title A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day – the indefinite article was deleted in the British editions.

Overall the work may act as a decent introduction to philosophy as a whole, but I personally feel you would be better off delving into the faster read and likely more honest books out there . The book is divided into three parts: Ancient Philosophy, Catholic Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. Every part of the world is - by definition - incomplete without its relation to the world as a Whole.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.