This edition first published 2019
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Edition History
First Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 1998); Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2006)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kenny, Anthony, 1931- author.
Title: An illustrated brief history of western philosophy, 20th anniversary edition / Sir Anthony Kenny, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Description: 3rd Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029651 (print) | LCCN 2018031024 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119531173 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119452805 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119452799 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy–History.
Classification: LCC B72 (ebook) | LCC B72 .K44 2018 (print) | DDC 190–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029651
Cover image: Frontispiece of “Opera”, vol.II, by Aristotle.
Venice: A. Torresanus, 1483. PML 21195. New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library.
© 2018. Photo The Morgan Library & Museum / Art Resource, NY / Scala, Florence
Cover design by Wiley
In the year 1946 Bertrand Russell wrote a one-volume History of Western Philosophy, which is still in demand. When it was suggested to me that I might write a modern equivalent, I was at first daunted by the challenge. Russell was one of the greatest philosophers of the century, and he won a Nobel Prize for Literature: how could anyone venture to compete? However, the book is not generally regarded as one of Russell's best, and he is notoriously unfair to some of the greatest philosophers of the past, such as Aristotle and Kant. Moreover, he operated with assumptions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical method which would be questioned by most philosophers at the present time. There does indeed seem to be room for a book which would offer a comprehensive overview of the history of the subject from a contemporary philosophical viewpoint.
Russell's book, however inaccurate in detail, is entertaining and stimulating and it has given many people their first taste of the excitement of philosophy. I aim in this book to reach the same audience as Russell: I write for the general educated reader, who has no special philosophical training, and who wishes to learn the contribution that philosophy has made to the culture we live in. I have tried to avoid using any philosophical terms without explaining them when they first appear. The dialogues of Plato offer a model here: Plato was able to make philosophical points without using any technical vocabulary, because none existed when he wrote. For this reason, among others, I have treated several of his dialogues at some length in the second and third chapters of the book.
The quality of Russell's writing which I have been at most pains to imitate is the clarity and vigour of his style. (He once wrote that his own models as prose writers were Baedeker and John Milton.) A reader new to philosophy is bound to find some parts of this book difficult to follow.
It is not possible to explain in advance what philosophy is about. The best way to learn philosophy is to read the works of great philosophers. This book is meant to show the reader what topics have interested philosophers and what methods they have used to address them. By themselves, summaries of philosophical doctrines are of little use: a reader is cheated if merely told a philosopher's conclusions without an indication of the methods by which they were reached. For this reason I do my best to present, and criticize, the reasoning used by philosophers in support of their theses. I mean no disrespect by engaging thus in argument with the great minds of the past. That is the way to take a philosopher seriously: not to parrot his text, but to battle with it, and learn from its strengths and weaknesses.
Philosophy is simultaneously the most exciting and the most frustrating of subjects. Philosophy is exciting because it is the broadest of all disciplines, exploring the basic concepts which run through all our talking and thinking on any topic whatever. Moreover, it can be undertaken without any special preliminary training or instruction. But philosophy is also frustrating, because, unlike scientific or historical disciplines, it gives no new information about nature or society. Philosophy aims to provide not knowledge, but understanding; and its history shows how difficult it has been, even for the very greatest minds, to develop a complete and coherent vision. It can be said without exaggeration that no human being has yet succeeded in reaching a complete and coherent understanding even of the language we use to think our simplest thoughts.
Philosophy is neither science nor religion, though historically it has been entwined with both. I have tried to bring out how in many areas philosophical thought grew out of religious reflection and grew into empirical science. Many issues which were treated by great past philosophers would nowadays no longer count as philosophical. Accordingly, I have concentrated on those areas of their endeavour which would still be regarded as philosophical today, such as ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind.
Like Russell I have made a personal choice of the philosophers to include in the history, and the length of time to be devoted to each. I have not, however, departed as much as Russell did from the proportions commonly accepted in the philosophical canon. Like him, I have included discussions of non-philosophers who have influenced philosophical thinking; that is why Darwin and Freud appear on my list of subjects. I have devoted considerable space to ancient and medieval philosophy, though not as much as Russell, who at the mid-point of his book had not got further than Alcuin and Charlemagne. I have ended the story at the time of the Second World War, and I have not attempted to cover twentieth-century continental philosophy.
Again like Russell, I have sketched in the social, historical, and religious background to the lives of the philosophers, at greater length when treating of remote periods and very briefly as we approach modern times.
My hope in publishing this book is that it may convey to those curious about philosophy something of the excitement of the subject, and point them towards the actual writings of the great thinkers of the past.
I am indebted to the editorial staff at Blackwells, and to Anthony Grahame, for assistance in the preparation of the book; and to three anonymous referees who made helpful suggestions for its improvement. I am particularly grateful to my wife, Nancy Kenny, who read the entire book in manuscript and struck out many passages as unintelligible to the non-philosopher. I am sure that my readers will share my gratitude to her for sparing them unprofitable toil.
January 1998
It is now twenty years since the first publication of this history. An illustrated edition came out in 2006. The present edition contains a new introduction, and three new chapters, two on twentieth-century continental philosophy and one on post-Wittgenstein analytic philosophy. The main text remains unchanged, but I have added a completely new set of suggestions for further reading, to reflect publications on the history of philosophy in recent years.
For help with this edition I am indebted to Marissa Koors and Giles Flitney.
May 2018
Plates
Between pages 226 and 227
1 Plato's Academy
2 The title page of a fifteenth-century manuscript translation of Aristotle's History of Animals
3 Lucretius' De rerum natura
4 Saint Thomas Aquinas introducing Saints Francis and Dominic to Dante
5 The intellectual soul being divinely infused into the human body
6 Machiavelli's austere apartment
7 Anrep's mosaic of lucidity in the National Gallery contains a portrait of Bertrand Russell
8 Wittgenstein in New York, as imagined by Eduardo Paolozzi
Figures
1 Pythagoras in Raphael's School of Athens
2 Parmenides and Heraclitus as portrayed by Raphael in the School of Athens
3 A herm of Socrates bearing a quotation from the Crito
4 Plato's use of animals to symbolize the different parts of the human soul (by Titian)
5 Aristotle, painted by Justus of Ghent
6 Athena introducing a soul into a body
7 A modern reconstruction of the schools of Athens
8 A fifth-century mosaic in Gerasa representing the city of Alexandria
9 Saint Augustine represented on a winged fifteenth-century altarpiece
10 John Scotus Eriugena disputing with a Greek abbot Theodore
11 Sculpture showing Abelard with Héloïse
12 Roundel of Duns Scotus
13 William Ockham
14 The title page of Thomas More's Utopia
15 The title page of Bacon's Instauratio Magna
16 Portrait of Descartes by Jan Baptist Weenix
17 Descartes' sketch of the mechanism whereby pain is felt by the soul
18 Portrait of Hobbes by Jan. B. Gaspars
19 Portrait of Baruch Spinoza by S. van Hoogstraten
20 David Hume, in a medallion by J. Tassie
21 Allan Ramsay's portrait of J. J. Rousseau
22 Title page of Kant's first Critique
23 Jeremy Bentham's ‘auto-icon’
24 Portrait of John Stuart Mill, by G. F. Watts
25 A cartoon by Wilhelm Busch of Schopenhauer with his poodle
26 Photograph of Charles Darwin
27 Freud's sketch of the Ego and the Id
28 A page of Frege's derivation of arithmetic from logic
29 Bertrand Russell as a young man
30 Henri Bergson made evolution the central pillar of his philosophy
31 Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir jointly presided over French intellectual life
32 Wittgenstein's identity card as an artilleryman in the Austrian army in 1918
33 Jacques Derrida often denied that he was a philosopher – perhaps correctly
34 The fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the end of Marxism as an official philosophy
35 Jurgen Habermas was influential in both continental and analytic circles
36 Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach made a philosophically formidable married couple
37 Willard van Orman Quine was for many years regarded as the foremost US philosopher
38 The Second Vatican Council ended the dominance of scholasticism in Catholic Universities
39 Philippa Foot reintroduced virtue as a central topic in ethics
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
T. S. Eliot: for an excerpt from Part IV of ‘The Dry Salvages’ from Four Quartets, copyright © 1941 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot, and for an excerpt from Part II of ‘Little Gidding’ from Four Quartets, copyright © 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, to Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber & Faber Ltd. (Reprinted by Faber in Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot.)
W. B. Yeats: for lines from ‘Among School Children’ from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, revised and edited by Richard J. Finneran, copyright © 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1956 by Georgie Yeats, to A. P. Watt Ltd., on behalf of Michael Yeats, and Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster.
The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in the next edition or reprint of this book.