Introduction: The Kingdome of Darknesse
Chronological Chart
1. Starting Afresh: Descartes
2. The Monster of Malmesbury: Hobbes
3. A Breeze of the Future: Spinoza
4. Philosophy for the British: Locke
5. An Interlude on a Comet: Bayle
6. The Best of All Possible Compromises: Leibniz
7. A Treatise of Animal Nature: Hume
8. What Has the Enlightenment Ever Done for Us? Voltaire, Rousseau and the Philosophes
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgements
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‘Gottlieb’s aim, admirably fulfilled, is to help us see what older and newer philosophers have to say to us, but not to turn them into mouthpieces for what we already think we know … Gottlieb often makes fun of his philosophers, but gently, as a way of bringing us closer to them, and they emerge as brilliant, vulnerable humans rather than monsters of any kind … a great achievement’ Michael Wood, The New York Times
‘A lucid, accessible history of Western philosophy’ Adam Kirsch, New Yorker
‘He writes with easy elegance and pace as he takes you on a tour of some of the high points of Enlightenment thinking … Gottlieb sweeps away a considerable stock of mythologies. He provides incisive and winning exegesis’ Richard Bourke, Literary Review
‘The century-and-a-half covered here is packed with important philosophical events. Many great thinkers (René Descartes, John Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to name but a few) were doing their finest work during this period – a period in which, along with the development of early modern philosophy, science was moving along apace and religion was undergoing an upheaval. Gottlieb therefore has a huge amount of ground to cover. He canters over it elegantly and with remarkable expertise’ Alex Dean, Prospect
‘An elegant journey through modern philosophy with a humane, witty, and expert guide’ K. Anthony Appiah
‘Vivid and illuminating … Gottlieb’s highly readable book can be recommended as an engaging personal introduction to some of our most brilliant moral and intellectual ancestors’ Thomas Nagel, New York Review of Books
‘He wears his learning lightly with an engaging and entirely comprehensible sequence of crystal-clear paragraphs … His prose is as witty as it is punctilious, peppered with clever, memorable lines … He is as crisp in his criticism of the thinkers he admires as he is of their shallower opponents’ Julian Baggini, Financial Times
‘Myths get their comeuppance in this well-written and fast-moving book’ Jonathan Rée, Guardian
‘Gottlieb’s survey of philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Reason, has been acclaimed as a modern classic. Its sequel, an expert account of mechanical scepticism and political theory from Descartes to Voltaire, is the lucid central panel of a triptych. If Gottlieb can pull off his final volume, he will surely supplant Bertrand Russell as the undergraduate’s guide … The Dream of Enlightenment is historically sensitive, intellectually subtle and an implicit argument for the culture of tolerance’ Dominic Green, Spectator
‘A rare combination of encyclopedic knowledge, clarity, and lapidary style. I have never seen a discussion of philosophy as fun to read, presented with such clarity. I spent a decade and a half waiting for this book, yet it exceeds expectation: Gottlieb has a philosophical erudition that is so refreshing in a world of narrow academic resumé building’ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan
Anthony Gottlieb is a former executive editor of the Economist and has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University and All Souls College, Oxford. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and The New York Times. He lives in New York.
I received a large amount of help over the many years during which this book was sporadically written. I especially wish to thank Oliver Black and Chaim Tannenbaum for commenting on the whole manuscript. I am grateful to Michael Ayers, Simon Blackburn, Desmond Clarke, Edmund Fawcett, Don Garrett, Zoë Heller, Cecilia Heyes, Michael Hickson, Sir Noel Malcolm, Peter Millican, Steven Nadler, Donald Rutherford, Ronald Schechter, the late Timothy Sprigge, Sir Keith Thomas and Catherine Wilson for commenting on parts of the book. And I am grateful to Maria Rosa Antognazza, Marc Bobro, Jonathan Israel, the late Lisa Jardine, Douglas Jesseph, Wim Klever, Sara Lipton, Giorgio Pini, Nicholas Rescher, Craig Walmsley, the late John Watling, the late Sir Bernard Williams and Yirmiahu Yovel for helpful correspondence or discussion. I am also grateful to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, and to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and its staff, for providing support and wonderful places in which to work. Lastly, I thank Bob Weil for his patience and encouragement.
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Chapters one and seven of this book draw on articles of mine that were published in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, respectively.