A History of Western Philosophy

This review is two-fold.
The book as product is simply gorgeous. 5 stars review if evere there were any for audiobooks' quality. Audio is perfect; graphic design of the cover is elegant and accurate; the narrator impersonates the very core or Russell's witty but serious personality, even conveying the author's respect or contempt for a philosopher through the tone of voice used during quotations of direct passages.

This last peculiarity of the book as a product opens to the principal characetristic of the book as a piece of thought. The title of this work is deceiving. What Russell wrote is not a HISTORY, but a CRITIQUE of Western philosophy, conceived by the point of view of the school of thought of which he was part, analytic show more empiricism. The work has been defined biased, first of all by Russell himself who advocated for intellectual honesty and considered calls for impartiality, in matters such as view of the worls of the basis of ethics, as contradictory and dangerously deceptive. I agree so much with his opinions in this regard, that I will go as far as saying that it is not bias what is regularly, coherently and openly stated as the view of the writer.
And believe me, you can tell Russell's views from one mile away! He demolishes Plato, Romanticism, Nietzsche, Schopenauer, Fichte and Bergson, to name some. There is a plan in this critique, and it becomes clear in the last few chapters, when he explains how, in his opinions, analytica philosophy solves the internal inconsistency of all the past philosophical schools and thinkers that tried to explain existence, and provide ethical guidance, in one great system based on metaphisics. In my opinion, recognising this feature of the work answers to the critiques about the unbalance between the stance taken in the three historical periods in which he divides the History of Philosophy: classical times, Middle Ages and modernity. I will not go into details, as many reviewers with a better historical and philosophical culture than mine have already written about the question. There is a lot of imprecision and too much generalisation, in my opinion, in delineating historical frameworks and in judging the Scholastic school, for example. Well, that was the state of the art regarding Medieval thought, at Russell's time, and anyway I forgive him all his flaws because I share much of his bias, except that I am an unrepented Marxist of Maoist tendencies... What I love in Russell is his honesty, his human empathy, his concern for the irrationalistic tendency and for the despise of patient analysis that characterised his times: keep in mind that he wrote during WWII. Not that OUR times are much more promising.
Whether you think he was right or not, this book makes for an enthralling listening (or reading) and still constitutes a classic of popularisation. Well, half-way popularisation; if you have no clue of what Western philosophy is, I would give advice for other books as a first general recognition.
Then, when you feel ready, come back and read this book. show less

I gave this 5 stars because it is incomparably the best single-volume history of philosophy that I’ve read, surpassing even that of Will Durant and Anthony Gottlieb.

It’s different from other histories of philosophy in three respects. First, it covers more general history than most accounts, which is necessary to really understand the philosophers. Second, Russell doesn’t just present the views of the various philosophers but provides his interpretations and critiques of their various positions. And third, the depth of analysis is far greater than from other authors.

There are three things I admire about Russell. One, as a writer, he packs a lot of meaning in as few words as possible, so while the book is long, a less skillful show more writer would have doubled the length. He believed in concise writing without the pretentious language.

Second, Russell thought deeply about the topics he wrote about, and was well-educated in mathematics, history, and philosophy. Even when he disagrees with a philosopher, he can present their views just as well as his own; this is something you’ll find lacking in many modern intellectuals.

Third, despite all his education and brilliance, he remained humble and anti-dogmatic. He went wherever his reasoning led him but was famous for saying he would never die for his beliefs because he could be wrong.

I should admit that I find myself agreeing with many of Russell’s ideas, and so maybe my review is a bit biased. As another reviewer mentioned, this is more of an analytic philosophers take on history than a fully objective history of philosophy, because Russell is not afraid to voice his opinion. Still, I think this view is slightly exaggerated because Russell does present the philosophy he disagrees with fully and accurately. He doesn’t set up straw men but he does, I think, successfully refute many of the ideas from Plato, Hegel, Marx, and others.

What I found particularly interesting was that Russell does not have the same reverence for Plato and Aristotle that many authors do. The works of Plato and Aristotle happened to survive, in large part because the mystical elements of each was easy to reconcile with the doctrines of the Catholic Church.

But as you read through the first section on ancient history, you realize Russell may be right: had the writings of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus survived, we may have had the Renaissance, scientific revolution, and Enlightenment happen sooner. These writings of the early atomists are fully consistent with modern science, and had they not been crushed under the influence of Plato and Aristotle, progress may have been realized sooner.

Russell believes, as I do, that there are two kinds of truth in the world, natural/scientific and psychological, and that the history of philosophy is largely the confusing of linguistic concepts taken to represent actually existing entities. All metaphysical entities, such as God, immortality, spirits, etc. are reconfigurations of actual things that exist into things that exist only within the mind. A quick example: unicorns are composed of horses and horns, each of which exist, but do not exist in the particular configuration I give them in my mind. My language can create configurations, but this does not make these configurations real. Likewise, God is simply the logical extension of goodness, knowledge, and love, taken to the extreme and reconfigured as one entity. But as we just saw, you can’t reconfigure things that actually exist into something that does simply by thinking about it.

The purpose of philosophy is, therefore, largely the clarification of concepts and the pursuit of rational ethics. If you don’t agree with this, if you favor continental philosophy, or if you believe that there is some kind of transcendent reality beyond the reach of science and accessible only through subjective experience, then this will not be your favorite book. But I doubt that it wouldn’t be valuable to you, and other than Russell I don’t know who could provide a better account of the analytic perspective. show less

As a former roommate of mine once indelibly said on the topic of the internet (the internet is my metaphor of choice for this book?), "it's got a lot of stuff on it." This 800-page monster goes right back to Thales, who was "the first philosopher", and right there you can see what one of its essential flaws is going to be. This matter of positivism--it's like, I recognize that talking about concepts like "civilization", say, or "correctness", is complicated, and I'm by no means unwilling to venture out of my relativist fastness (spend most of my time taking the air out on the battlements anyway), but this is a bit much. In part, of course, it's no more than you might expect from the lion of the "secular humanist" movement (the people show more who don't get that 90% of us are secular humanists and think it means something to be all proclaimin' alla time); in part, it's merely the vagaries of being a famous public philosopher for a long damn time and having to keep up with social and rhetorical currents (I read that somewhere else, in 1929, Russell said that black people shouldn't be exterminated because they work better than white people in the tropics--"apart from questions of humanity"); in third part, though, I think it's an approach Russell would ultimately defend, because he started out as a late Victorian trying to salvage belief in the Absolute through math amid the ripening and loosening of a society. The flip side of the "extermination of Negroes" business, and one which is less easy to chalk up to ephemeral habits of thought and expression, is that he figured it was right for Europeans to colonize North America and any place where they put the land to "better use" than the indigenous inhabitants.

So the guy believes in progress. It seems absurd, since his fundamental conception of philosophy is as "something intermediate between theology and science"--addressing, like theology, areas of human interest about which definite knowledge has not so far been accessible, but assaying, like science, to base its conclusions on reason and evidence rather than revealed truth. (It goes without saying that the boundaries between philosophy and science/theology respectively are going to be fuzzy.) That's a good, practical definition, but I can't see how, ultimately, you can then avoid cleaving away ontology and metaphysics--as well, of course, as things like physics and physiology, over time, on the latter of which Russell would certainly agree with me. He is very good as a historian of these dead letters--Heraclitus on being being flux, say, or Aquinas on cognitive psychology--and to give him his due, even good at drawing connections forward and being suggestive of ways that Heraclitus (e.g.; or, better, Democritus) prefigures the state of our knowledge today.

Where we part ways is on the ontological and metaphysical--theory of knowledge, say, or proofs of the existence of God. In the latter case, Russell would agree that these are not possible, but would also say that this needs to be rigorously proven, which I think totally misreads the nature of belief. (He is beyond, like rational proofs, but still has a lot of time for refuting William James's instrumental argument for God, which must have seemed a lot more necessary in his day. In the former case, he does seem to feel that we are on the verge of great mathematical advances that will dissolve completely problems like the relation of subject and object, or mind and body, and to the degree that I can admit this, I'd say it's empirical science that has achieved those answers, not logic.

But enough--he's a logical positivist, and this book is redolent of. Fine. It's also redolent of TONNES OF INFO, in a much more erudite and cross-allusive style than Wikipedia. I knew a bit about the Pre-Socratics, but nothing at all about Orphism, the mystical Greek brotherhood which helps me close the gulf between Olympian belief and Plato and also to understand the significance of Pythagoras-as-mystic on subsequent philosophy (world of forms!). Great stuff. The chapters on the Hellenistic philosophies maybe hardsell his conviction that thought-systems represent "the" essence of their times a bit--I don't disagree that Stoics and Epicureans and Skeptics and Cynics all performed in their various ways turtling manoeuvres against a declining and uncertain world, but--as evidenced by the complex subsequent history of each of these terms--there's no reason at all to downplay the generative or fecund aspects of these philosophies, no reason to be as goddamn programmatic as Russell all the time about what is and isn't useful. Like, whether we leave ontology and metaphysics behind or not, I think that he and I would agree that the, or a, role of philosophy is in ethics and aesthetics and rhetoric (and, still, teasing at the crevices in the scientific understanding of knowledge and the mind), and if the Hellenistic Four are basically ethical philosophies, then surely somebody who's writing a book about the history of philosophy's relation to its cultural context can have a bit more time for the idea that their systems are as good as ours, and just made for different times? But no, the positivist again rears its head. (By the way, names for four rabbits--don't steal 'em--Pyrrho, Epicurus, Diogenes, and Zeno.)

The stuff on the Church Fathers, again, really good, and hauls me some part of the way back from the sour thoughts I traditionally have about St. Augustine. Good quick investigations of heresies, which are actually kind of a new weird interdisciplinary field all of a sudden in the middle ages--as opposed to being simply persecuted or ignored, they come--the designation of a belief as heretical comes--to grant it a special entity, a multiutility, between philosophy and religion and politics and law. I've forgotten which one now was about how God is better than Christ, and which one was about how Christ has two natures, and which one was about how he has one nature but two substances, and etc., but I do remember that "faith without works is dead" is Pelagianism, because that shit's moral and true.

I come to realize that some of the glazing over I do with certain philosophers isn't because I'm just a stupid; it's cos certain philosophers are just too boring--Kant--or abstruse--Berkeley--for words. (Others, for instance Hegel, are actually fascinatingly weird, as long as you can read Russell telling you about it and never have to crack an actual Hegel book, ew.) I find that the discussion on Descartes takes me only tenuously from the cogito to the actual methodological understanding of rationalism that I hoped to get from the book--like, I get the ultimate contingency of knowledge and the advisability of proceeding from first principles (really I do, I did mushrooms and wrote gibberish about it when I was 19 and took it to my professor's house at 4 in the AM!), but I don't get how you go from there to actually establishing principles to work on in thinking about the mundane world, except with something that looks an awful lot like just an asterisked empiricism.

With Locke, there is a valuable discussion of how he was responding to the divine right of kings as expressed by one Thomas Filmer, that can be easily used to bolster my discussion of his work on language in my thesis--as there is no intrinsic chain of command in human affairs, necessitating a social contract, so there is no intrinsic chain of meaning in speech, necessitating a compact bestowing meaning on arbitrary signs. With Leibniz, all I know is monads sound adorable and I want to eat them up, yum! With Spinoza, I want to eat him up, because he sounds like a dear soul.

I don't mean to imply by leaving anyone out (I am leaving out many) that they are not covered--he walks us through Rousseau, with scorn; through Hume, who comes across like a ghost in the machine of ultimate probabilism and relativism, a predeconstructionist; through the utilitarians, with nothing new to say; and through a chapter on Byron that rather idiosyncratically traces a lineage from him through Fichte and Nietzsche to Hitler. (You get what he was going for, of course, and it's a good bracing reminder that nobody writing in 1943 saw Nietzsche as a prophet of fierce joy like the scholarly types do today.) Up against that call-it-Dionysian, irrational German Idealist revolt against the empirical, he puts a Apollonian, rationalistic revolt that starts with Smith and Ricardo, goes through Marx, and ends up in Stalin--a framework that Slavoj Zizek would make hay with and that does leave you thinking about how far we can separate these philosophers of the optimistic 19th century from their appropriations in the dark 20th--not to condemn them, not even thinking that concentration camps and gulags are anywhere in Nietzsche's or Marx's thought, but just to keep in mind the potential for misuse (all true of liberal philosophy too, of course, and still going on).

The last few chapters are more speculative--the stuff on Bergson, whom I wasn't familiar with, is interesting; his metaphor for life, as a "shell that bursts into pieces that are themselves shells", and his action-model, make me think of Deleuze in the illogic of their metaphor-delving approach, only a dynamic Deleuze that wants to punch you in the face kinda. How accurate that is, I don't know, but certainly by the end Russell has roughly sketched out the contours of 20th-century analytic and continental philosophy, in all their pedantic and spurious respective glories. There is also "neutral monism", which if I knew more about it might just show me that there is still a place for a philosophy-type model of inquiry/perception/experience, as merely one form of interaction between materials. There's a lot of stuff in this book, and you don't need more than a medium dash of healthy skepticism (not Pyrrho's kind!) to avoid Russell's biases leading you down the garden path. show less

An important point was left out of this book: The history of philosophy is also a history of drunks.

Bertrand Russell has attempted to give a brief overview of the History of Western Philosophy. In this 900 page tome he touches on the major figures, major fields of thought, and the socio-political backgrounds that influenced (and were influenced by) them. Russell also offers up some critique on these aspects, because it wouldn't be a philosophy book if it wasn't doing so.

This description sounds like anathema to entertaining reading, and it would be if it wasn't being tackled by someone like Russell. Bertrand has a very clear, concise, and accessible writing style, and is easily able to explain in plain language even the most complex of show more philosophical ideas. Normally reading philosophy reminds me of reading genetics textbooks, as it is overstuffed with pedantry and jargon, Russell makes it feel like he is uses no jargon or technical terms.

It should also be noted that Russell is snarky to the point that you find yourself having to laugh and share his comment with someone. His comments are withering and witty, but they also serve as a great way of highlighting the flaws with certain arguments or "great" thinkers. If there are a few takeaway points from this book it is that the great minds were way ahead of their time, but that those same minds were confined by the structures of their time. It makes you wonder how many of today's ideas are going to look silly and biased to future peoples.

This isn't really a book to read about certain philosophers, nor fields of thought. A History of Western Philosophy is more a cliff notes version of several thousand years of thinking. Definitely an emphasis on the history and context. And it is all viewed through Russell's eyes, his snarky, snarky, eyes. show less

Finally! It took several months, but I finally finished. And this book was worth every minute. It's the best history of philosophy I've read. Not that I have read enough histories to determine that this is the best out there. But I have read a few which I can compare it to. Many histories of philosophy are far too simplistic, written at a level appropriate for a junior high student. I tried to break away from that type by reading Frederick Coppleston's history, but that was over-correcting the problem. Coppleston's history is very long (9 volumes at ~500pgs each) and far too dull for a casual reader. It is only suited for a dedicated student of philosophy. I got through the first volume and gave up.

Russell's history, however, is written show more perfectly for a casual reader with a college level education. His style is easy to read and even contains few bits of dry British humor. But aside from the prose, what really makes Russell's history superior is the manner in which he discusses each philosopher's theories. Russell explains the philosopher's biographical background and the major events of his time. He uses this contextual material to illustrate how external events influenced the thoughts of each philosopher. I think that is something that most histories of philosophy lack. And where the do include some context, it is usually a simple biography; they don't explain how certain events may have influenced modes of thought.

Another element that I very much enjoyed was Russell's own personality and opinions coming through in his critiques of past philosophers. For most of them, he maintains a commendable level of objectivity. But for those whose philosophies led to the foundations of Nazi fascism, you can sense his indignation. Russell was a Brit, and he wrote this history during WWII, so you might suspect there is something of a patriotic distrust of the German philosophers. But Russell was far from a nationalist either (he was thrown in jail for his pacifism during WWI). I think he disliked the German idealists (particularly Hegel and Nietzsche) because he was a humanist and liberal that could not tolerate any philosophy that could be used to promote the subjugation of one set of people by another.

A couple items I thought were missing from this history were discussions of Wittgenstein and Godel. I can understand Russell's reluctance to discuss Wittgenstein. Russell was Wittgenstein's teacher at Cambridge. And Godel's theorem essentially crushed Russell's life's work to create a complete and consistent logic, so I can also understand his reticence on that subject. But getting Russell's perspective on both of those men would have been extremely fascinating.

If you do decide to read this, I would highly, highly, highly recommend that you first read Logicomix, a graphic novel about several philosophers involved in the search for truth through logic. It focuses primarily on Russell, and through it you will gain an understanding about his personality, which will make reading his history of philosophy even more enjoyable. It will allow you to put Russell's words in a historical and biographical context, just as he does for the philosopher's that he critiques. And Logicomix is just a great read in it's own right. show less

In this wonderfully wide-ranging, intelligent and humane book Russell not only introduces the most important philosophers and philosophies from the ancient Greeks onward (in the Western tradition, that is, he alludes occasionally to oriental traditions where they influence western philosophy, but on the whole they are outside his remit), he gives the historical and social context from which the philosophies rose. I found this to be particularly valuable; my modern mind often has difficulty how some beliefs could have been held, but when Russell explains how it was not only more important for a philosophy to be internally consistent than anything else, but that before the era of modern science so much was unknown about the way the world show more and the universe worked that it was less clear cut what was feasible and what impossible, I felt I understood a lot more. I will not pretend to have understood all the philosophy herein - I have read very little philosophy, and i think that it is an area that needs a certain frame of mind or a thorough grounding, or possibly both - but putting the various philosophies into both historical context and into a continuum with the ideas on which they were built gave me a far greater understanding than I otherwise would have gained.

Even more important to this is Russell's wonderful style. He describes ideas and events with a clarity and fluidity which is astounding, even if some of the ideas still remain somewhat opaque simply because of their complexity to my way of thinking. He is a joy to read, bringing the historical detail and the lives of the philosophers to three dimensions, and regularly throwing in gems of urbane wit that sometimes had me chuckling out loud. While he describes the ideas, for the most part, with academic disinterest (although never dryly), Russell does not necessarily seek to be unbiased; he is forthright in saying, for example, that he not only disagrees with Nietzsche but dislikes his outlook, his fascination with violence, admiration for conquerors and dismissal of 'trivial' humanity. Russell shows, obliquely, how his own philosophy is driven by a belief in humanity and that, while progress might not be inevitable as the writers of the early industrial age seemed to believe, it can be brought about and sustained by human action. He also, in the closing chapter, points out why philosophy is vital to our understanding while at the same time recognising that it has many shortcomings.

Bertrand Russell had a truly magnificent mind and a privileged education, but even taking this into account, one of the things this book shows is something we seem to have lost in the current world of educating people for a specific vocation; Russell shows, and expects his readers to have, a familiarity not only with the subject on which he is writing, but with history, literature and culture beyond that relatively narrow field. Reading a book like this shows how vitally important that is, that making bridges between isolated subjects can lead to a greater understanding of all of them.

There are flaws, both of which I shall put down to the times in which he was writing;this book was written in the 1940s when Russell was already in his 70s. He lived to be 98. He tends to write that 'men have written' or 'men think' where a more modern writer would say 'people have written' or 'scholars think' (although one of the first modern academics to whom he refer is a woman). The other is in the chapter on the 19th century, when he mentions Darwin. While he does not quite get Darwin's theory right, I think this is largely because he was writing in a time when the theory had become distorted both by social Darwinists and by other bits of superfluous baggage that have been dropped away, and before clinching evidence like DNA was discovered.

A book I will keep close by to listen to again, and get hold of a paper copy so I can pore in more detail over some of the more difficult theories. show less

Book One (and bits of Book Three) read 2020.

Magisterial is the only word for it. The breadth of knowledge here is enormous, and it is immensely readable - it feels chatty but never shallow. It does occasionally drift into long-windedness, though perhaps that's only a result of some things being more interesting than others (sorry Plotinus).

Book Two next, after a break...