A Little History of Philosophy

A good summary view

If you're new to philosophy, this is a good summary view of the field from Aristotle to Singer. There are some interesting omissions, such as Heidegger, and some nice looks at modern issues.

It's not a deep book, nor is it intended to be. It gives a snapshot for inspiration for further learning.

If you have a fair grasp of philosophy already, and have struggled through a few writers on your own, you might do better with Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, in which the author takes on many of the same philosophers with more vigor. Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy covers many of the issues with less history.

In the Great Courses series there are similar summaries. Exploring Metaphysics is one I can recommend. Great Minds of the Medieval World covers many of the early philosophers found here with more depth.

52 of 53 people found this review helpful

Very Well Done

What did you love best about A Little History of Philosophy?

This was a very interesting overview of major philosophers from Socrates to the present time. Just the right level for me. I had studided briefly some philosophy in college, but forgotten most of it, and wanted an overview the major people and ideas.

This was perfect and the reading was excellent.

35 of 36 people found this review helpful

Loved it. Succinct, humorous, digestible bits

Finally, a nice summary of highlights of western philosophy. I loved every minute of it and will re-listen a few more times in the future.

43 of 45 people found this review helpful

Good Listen

Exactly the type of book I was looking for. A broad overview, to the point and informative.

37 of 39 people found this review helpful

The Easy Track to the Big Picture

Really enjoyable overview of western thinking with a strong narrator. Organization is mostly chronological. Easy to listen to chapters a couple of time. This is prepping me before reading actual works by some of the philosophers.

32 of 34 people found this review helpful

Spectacular!

Each key philosophy is described in chronological order and in detail. The author makes this complex subject come alive. His narrative is newbie - friendly and scholarly. =)

40 of 43 people found this review helpful

Locke's Socks or, How We Got Where We Are Now

Consider this brainteaser from John Locke: you have a pair of socks. Every time you wear a hole in them, you patch it. Eventually, the socks are all patches—there’s none of the original material left. Are they the same socks?

That’s why I don’t “do” philosophy. I just can’t get excited at the prospect of sitting around wondering how I know what I know. Or whether the world around me is a figment of my imagination. I’ve got a job to do. Kids to raise. Socks to buy.

But when some nice chap like Nigel Warburton, who understands these things, sits down and writes a layman’s guide to philosophy I sit up and take notice, especially if it’s on sale. Because deep down I still suspect that when I steered clear of philosophy in college (except for the scraps that were necessary when reading, say, Chaucer or Dante) I was leaving a gaping hole in my education.

If you’re anything like me, this Little History will teach you a lot about yourself. Your reactions to the different positions expounded should help you get a grip on where you stand vis-a-vis God, the Cosmos, Life, Death and other concepts that start with capital letters.

For example. I am Catholic, a convert as of the year 2000. I find the prospect of a purely physical, God-less universe about as terrifying as any vision of Hell. Therefore I am repelled by the Logical Positivists’ enthroning of science and empirical rationalism to the exclusion of all metaphysics. On the other hand, reading John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government bores me beyond tears, but I could spend all day reading about the revolution his works helped inspire.

In other words, while needing to see abstract ideas worked out in the physical world, I just as readily eschew ideas that embrace the physical to the exclusion of the metaphysical. It’s not quite a paradox, I know. But it strikes me as an inconsistency in my makeup. It’s the kind of self-insight this book of many viewpoints will provoke in you, too.

And there are a lot of viewpoints. 40 bite-sized chapters (no more than 10 to 14 minutes) sum up most of the important thinkers from Socrates to Peter Singer. I couldn’t help being reminded of Monty Python’s “Philosopher’s Song”—the thinkers and their schools of thought go by so fast. Brevity necessitates a focus on just one or two aspects of any philosopher. In the case of Darwin or Marx, that’s not a real problem: their ideas were pretty monolithic. It doesn’t work so well for someone like Saint Thomas Aquinas or Hegel.

While learning something about myself, I learned even more about the trajectory of philosophy over the past two and a half millennia. But more on that later.

As other reviews have said, this Little History is a compact yet comprehensive survey, well written and engagingly read. While I enjoyed it very much, however, history has taught me that ideas—especially bad ideas—have consequences. This rollicking romp through Western Thought could never make me completely shake off the feeling that the more modern the philosophy, the more it becomes a mere intellectual game, a showcase for the cleverness of the philosopher. We admire those we deem “brilliant”, forgetting that mental agility is no guarantee of healthy or constructive thinking.

For instance:

From the chapter on the Stoics I gained something that has been invaluable in my daily task of raising two teenagers: people tend to treat their emotions like the weather. It may be storming outside, but we forget that we have control over our emotions.

On the other hand:

In his youth the French Revolution convinced Hegel that “fundamental assumptions can be overturned, and that what seemed to be fixed for all time needn’t be.” He held this outlook for the rest of his life—even after the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars.

Rejecting Kant’s concept of nouminal reality, Hegel decided that, “the mind shaping reality just is reality”. Which is like the child who closes their eyes and says, “You can’t see me”.

To avoid the hopeless cycle of yearning for things, acquiring them and then yearning for something else, Schopenhauer recommended a life of poverty and chastity. (Really? I thought that was called “monasticism”.)

John Stuart Mill believed that, given the choice between binge-watching Beverly Hills 90210 and reading Hamlet, we would all opt for the “higher pleasure”. As Warburton points out, Mills’ mistake was in assuming everyone was like him.

For William James, “truth is simply what works”. In other words, if the shadows on the wall of Plato’s famous cave “work” for the people chained therein, why bother bringing them out into the sunlight?

With his “philosophic calculus”, Bentham attempted to pinpoint how much happiness each experience affords us—assuming we all could agree on the value of each “unit” of happiness. And how many units should be assigned to eating ice cream or working out.

Hegel’s idea of the End of History wasn’t the Second Coming but “the gradual and inevitable coming to self-awareness of Spirit through the march of Reason.” It's a point of view, “no one had really appreciated before” and I don’t wonder why. I’ll opt for a loving Savior over an inevitable march every time. Especially when Warburton tells us scholars can’t even agree how to translate Hegel’s word for “Spirit”.

And A. J. Ayers’ version of Logical Positivism—that only statements which are “true by definition” and “empirically verifiable” can be believed—ultimately perished in the gears of its own logic.

The real problem with philosophers—or, at least my problem with philosophers—is twofold. First, since the divorce of philosophy and theology in the Early Modern Period, philosophers have started from their own private preconceptions. Sartre’s own private rejection of God led him to conclude that all of us human beings have no purpose (this, by the way, was his notion of “freedom”.)

Secondly, philosophers don’t know when to quit, following their ideas beyond the limits of absurdity. Rousseau argued so passionately for his notion of freedom that he ended up insisting that those who disagreed with his notion should be “forced to be free”. Apropos of philosophy acted out in history, we know what that kind of thinking made possible in the 20th Century.

As long as we’re pondering inevitabilities, the trajectory of this book, from Socrates to Singer, inevitably reminds me not how far we’ve come to how far we’re fallen. Yes, I know: thinking that everything was better “back then” is always an iffy proposition. You can so easily end up in a bunker, oblivious to the good things that Modern Times can offer. On the other hand, one of those good things isn’t the alarming philosophy of, say, Peter Singer.

For instance: Why is it mandatory that I give to a charity that saves the lives of children in Africa, yet I should not hesitate to pull the plug on a person in a vegetative state? True, we know those children are in need—but just as truly, we cannot say with absolute certainty what is going on inside that person’s mind. Or, even more importantly, their soul. Further: isn’t Singer’s insistence on pulling the plug much akin to treating that person as a “dumb animal”, something to which he would strenuously object (if, of course, we were talking about an animal)? That’s what happens when philosophy, once the handmaid of theology, becomes the handmaid of science.

As Warburton says in his summing up, reading Singer—or any philosopher—“will make you think hard” about your own positions on issues. Ultimately, rather than rely on the “new generation” of philosophers Warburton speaks of, who aim at teaching us “how to live”, I’ll rely on the millennia of wisdom reposed in the Catholic Church and, by extension, the Western Tradition. Philosophy once served theology because the Judeo-Christian revelation was recognized as a surer guide to life than mere human speculation. At the same time, human reason was valued as a tool to more deeply understand that revelation. Putting aside our modern insistence that orthodox belief somehow strangles original thought, I’ve found that it provokes and supports original thought, starting with the idea that there’s something seriously wrong at the heart of our modern philosophy.

9 of 9 people found this review helpful

Great recap of introductory philosophy

This book does not stick out in any spectacular way. It was well written but not prosaic. It was funny but not hilarious. It was informative, but it did not explore new frontiers. Still, I quite liked this book. Each chapter dealt with one or two of the usual suspects in the history of philosophy. Following the Western philosophical tradition, it begins, with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and a few other Greek dudes. I was slightly disappointed that Democritus, a personal favorite, did not get a chapter. He then moves on, chronologically, devoting chapters to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, as well as Darwin and William James who I consider to be more like scientists (though I guess that scientists are in some sense philosophers). The author also devotes chapters to some modern scholars such as Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Turing, and Peter Singer who is still trying to poke the world with his version of utilitarianism.

Since chapters are short and economically written, you rarely get bored as a reader. This is quite hard to do, and it seems to me that many authors lack the ability to only keep the most relevant text. Apart from a brief comprehensible description of the ideas of each philosopher, the author also provides the historical context. Unlike Bertrand Russell's History of Western philosophy, which is much much longer, this book does not give a detailed analysis of the validity of every idea. Typically it merely describes the ideas and leaves the rest to the reader.

If you have forgotten your introductory philosophy or if you would like to get an introduction to philosophy, but you don’t have weeks to spend then this book is an excellent choice.

10 of 11 people found this review helpful

Excellent, short but sweet

Would you consider the audio edition of A Little History of Philosophy to be better than the print version?

I enjoy listening to books as I do other things around the house and especially enjoy a well written and spoken book when finding myself wide awake during the night.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

Clear and sometimes entertaining history of the world's most famous philosophers and some of their rather unique turns of mind.

Any additional comments?

Definitely a book I will listen to more than once. Would recommend it highly.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Meet the great minds.

Nice work,full of facts and guide to the great thinkers of
the past. History and religion.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful