History of Western Philosophy

This book by Bertrand Russell is pretty much what it says on the tin,* being in itself one of the most famous and influential academic works of the twentieth century. Russell being a thinker of incredible stature in his own right, this more broadly germane outline of the key figures and trends in the history of western philosophical thought never fails to be an insightful, illuminating, and surprisingly easy-to-read book.

    To give a coherently satisfactory summary of this weighty tome is far beyond the scope of a blogpost, so I will merely list out the figures and trends covered, and then give a few reflections of my own on the text as a whole. Russell divides the history of philosophy in the west into the broad chunks - ancient, Catholic, and modern.

    The "ancient" section starts with the pre-Socratics: after an initial chapter about the rise of Greek civilisation, we look into the Milesian school, and then more closely at Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, and Protagoras; we also have chapters on the relation of Athens to cultural developments and the influence of Sparta. Following this we get onto the Big Three Boys of classical thought - elusive as he is we only have the only chapter on Socrates, but then Plato has distinct chapters covering the source of his opinions, his notion of utopia, his theory of ideas, his ideas around immortality, his cosmogony, and his thoughts regarding knowledge and perception - Aristotle has almost as many chapters too, covering his metaphysics, politics, ethics, logic, and physics. A supplementary chapter details ancient Greek developments in mathematics and astronomy. The final section of this first third of the book ties up the ancient period with a brief consideration of Hellenism's impact more broadly, then covering the cynics and skeptics, the Epicureans, the stoics, the changes culturally wrought by the Roman Empire, and finally the only individual thinker in this part to get his own chapter, Plotinus.

    The "Catholic" section is divided between the older Fathers of the Church and the latter scholastics. We begin with a broad sketch of the history of Judaism and its evolution into Christianity, then tracing intellectual currents within the first four centuries of Church history. A particularly meaty chapter then lumps together three 'doctors' of the Church - saints Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine; the last of which gets an extra following chapter diving into his theology and philosophy more intensively. A vaguer but still fascinating chapter covers the dark days of the fifth and sixth centuries, and then the influences of St Benedict and Gregory the Great, before we consider the impact of the Papacy within the dark ages. John the Scot gets his own chapter, before we zoom back out for a wider take on ecclesiastical reforms in the eleventh century, as well as the multifarious impacts of Islam, and then the general trends of things in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While no individual thinker is predominant in these looser historical chapters there were still many profoundly interesting people discussed who I'd never heard of. St Thomas Aquinas gets his own chapter, unsurprisingly, before the section is finished off with discussions of Franciscan schoolmen and the eclipse of the Papacy towards the end of the medieval era.

    The final third of the book, concerned with "modern" philosophy, opens with a double-barrel of general characteristics of the Renaissance and then how this manifested in Italy specifically. After smaller chapters on Machiavelli, and Erasmus and More, we plunge back into more broad historical analysis, as both the Reformation and its counter-Reformation were taking place against a backdrop of the rising tides of scientific inquiry and achievement. Most of the rest of the chapters in this part concern individual thinkers; Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, after a preable-chapter discussing the wider tendencies toward a growing liberalism Locke gets three chapters detailing his theory of knowledge, his political theory, and his influence; then we have Berkeley, Hume, a slight tangent discussing the cultural challenges and changes wrought by the romantic movement and later a broader consideration of deeper trends in the nineteenth century particularly, then Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the utilitarian school (John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and their ilk), Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey - and finally closing out on the most modern trend in western philosophy at the time of this book's writing** being logical analysis.

    I am obviously not going to dissect his presentation of all of this content in detail. What I will say is that he clearly knows what he is talking about to an immensely intimate degree, and even when presenting thinkers with whom he disagrees strongly (a fact he will always let the reader know, often in great detail and with sparklingly dry logically-witty remarks) he is careful to present the general details of what they thought and, most probably, why, insofar as one can surmise this from a historical perspective, with a generous degree of goodwill. Russell never shrinks from decrying what he thinks is wrong but he will never misrepresent it to make his doing so easier - in fact some of the densest writing in this book appears when he is well into the hedges of having to content with particularly messy or convoluted ideas to unwrap just what a thinker originally thought in order to judge how much veracity it likely has. He is also always very good at situating systems of thought in their historical context, so that cultural and political influences as well as the personal circumstances of these ideas' originators can all be taken into account when we are brought to judge the evolving steps in the development of the western modes of thought.

    Russell is a superlative academic and I think anyone would get a huge amount of benefit from reading this book. It will be inordinately eye-opening for anyone who has ever wondered where our ideas have come from and how they have been shaped and reshaped over the millennia-long story of western civilisation. While I do not personally agree with Russell on everything, I cannot refute him as a keen and penetrating thinker with a sharp and soft and strong set of moral sentiments - and what is more, despite the potentially off-putting nature perhaps inherent in a book of such scale and ambition, he is remarkably easy to read, never needlessly academic for its own sake, and delightfully largely free from that habit all-too-common in professional philosophers and theologians to dump random Latin or Greek phrases at you with no translatory footnotes. Overall I think this book is well worth a visit from any reader with a general curiosity - if you're looking for a solid text on the history of western philosophy, this is almost certainly IT - and if you're just a casual reader who'd like to get their teeth stuck into something highly educational and world-broadening, this might take you a while to get all the way through but I guarantee you'll get a great deal out of the experience.

* I'm reading it as I'm in the process of planning an application for a PhD in philosophy and not only has it been a few years since I've been involved in direct academia but I am painfully aware of my own blind spots, and this seems like a good place to start broadly rectifying those. In close tandem with reading through this I've also been watching my way through Arthur Holmes's own history of philosophy course, which is all on YouTube - Holmes deals immediately with fewer key philosophers than Russell does, but goes into far greater detail on each, and in my opinion it's a much more helpful introduction to those thinkers he does cover, as his commentary is more concerned with explaining the intricacies of each rather than, as is Russell's wont, going into somewhat opinionated digressions about why so-and-so is wrong. The comparison of these two also highlights a couple of interesting lacunas - while Holmes gives almost zero air-time to the pre-Socratics, which Russell has an entire part of the book dedicated to, Russell mentions Kierkegaard (inarguably an immensely important figure for modern philosophy) exactly zero times, and while Holmes has a full two hour-long lectures on A. N. Whitehead (whom one would expect Russell to talk about at least a bit given that Whitehead was his professor when he was just starting out in philosophy, and they wrote the Principia Mathematica together) Russell barely mentions his mentor.

** The manuscript was originally composed over the course of World War Two, which makes the occasional passing remarks about Hitler and Stalin all the more striking.