Randall Collins

This book was...intense. Now truth be told I only "dabble" in philosophy; I was never in academia. Nonetheless, I have read more than a smattering from major philosophers, Western and Eastern, about half in my library and half from the public library, but this book made me feel lost several times. The Greeks, the ancient Chinese, the Indians, the Muslims, and those who would follow up in The West to about the early to mid 1900's are covered here. Needless to say, that's a lot of ground, even show more if only major philosophers are covered. But this is a book about networks of philosophers and how knowledge is created and modified by social interactions, so many more names and obscure positions/movements come into play. This is not to mention the names of scientists and mathematicians which are integral to the latter part of the text! I was impressed with the breadth and truth-be-told not insignificant depth of this man's presentation. The vast majority of the time, I was intrigued, but there were some times when my background was simply insufficient to follow the name-dropping. This was an amazing comparative romp through intellectual history across boundaries of nationality and time.

The title is a bit misleading, though. The vast majority of the words in this tome are devoted to a history of philosophy rather than a focus on the sociology of this field. The diagrams showing linkages between major and minor philosophers are very much an integral part of the text, but a description of oppositions between varying factions according to the law of small numbers could just as well be a historical treatment as a sociological one. The epilogue of the book does come closer to sociological analysis, but unfortunately prior to that epilogue is a "meta-reflections" section which gets a bit repetitive, echoing sociological observations made elsewhere in the text.

I am glad to have read this book. Given the complexity of the material, the author conveys things well. Maybe 10-15 years from now when I've read from more thinkers I'll undertake this book again and gain insights missed the first time around. But I don't recommend a work of this magnitude lightly, and I'm afraid that those without a significant philosophical background will not find it worth the trouble, as it won't be understandable. show less

The sociological points in this book are quite simple and not very theoretical, so I would categorize this book primarily as history of philosophy rather than sociology of philosophy. But the great merit of this book is that it presents very erudite overviews of the grand patterns in western, indian and chinese philosophical traditions through the ages. Particularly the graphs showing which schools/thinkers influenced later ones are in my opinion very useful. Read this book first, then all show more the primary sources, then this book again and you're set. show less

An adequate reviewer of this book would be well rehearsed in the histories of Asian, Indian, and Ancient and late western philosophies. I am not that person. I read philosophy for the same reason the great philosophers studied it: to learn to lead the good life. I am very much not academic-like in my taking on philosophy.

The author proposes that there are significant interactions among the personalities in a particular philosophical nation, so to speak. Some personalities wield more power show more than others. There is room in the attention space for a limited number of ideas to be considered. The author draws diagrams of personal connections and reviews a whole lot of philosophy to a depth to which I have never been. I have, however, done some serious reading of philosophy, so I could understand it, although I, shudder, had to work at it. I have noticed that Plato and much of Hinduism have similar takes on the cyclicality of things that is not in, say, the Bible. From the table of contents of this book, I thought that it might address the possibility of connection between Greek and Indian thinking.

He treated each national, so to speak, area as independent or largely independent. That is to say, my interest was not addressed. Nevertheless he had enough to say of each area that my attention returned every evening to the book until I was through it, and I feel well served by it. He is a sociologist so he can mention the social construction of mathematics with a straight face, but there is no gobbledygook. His sentences take more work than the sentences of, say, Bertrand Russell, but they make sense as for example, "Along with the rise of Vaishnavism and its inner splits and its polemics with Advaita had come the spread of argument about epistemological validity into every intellectual camp."

I am finding that the book that does address my interest in the Indian and Greek connection, The Shape of Ancient Thought, is as difficult to read, again because of the long sentences and the number of new ideas to be juggled. The well rehearsed reader should not have as hard a time with either. show less

Good as pastiche, very good for background on the Cambridge Apostles, only moderately good as mystery. The author is an excellent historical sociologist and wrote an astonishing historical sociology of the past 2500 years of philoisophy.