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This illustrated edition of Sir Anthony Kenny's acclaimed survey of Western philosophy offers the most concise and compelling story of the complete development of philosophy available. Spanning 2,500 years of thought, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy provides essential coverage of the most influential philosophers of the Western world, among them Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Replete with over 60 illustrations - ranging from Dufresnoy's The Death of Socrates, through to the title page of Thomas More's Utopia, portraits of Hobbes and Rousseau, photographs of Charles Darwin and Bertrand Russell, Freud's own sketch of the Ego and the Id, and Wittgenstein's Austrian military identity card - this lucid and masterful work is ideal for anyone with an interest in Western thought.… (more)
User reviews
It's a fairly anglocentric book - from the middle ages on, Kenny generally alternates chapters on "British" and "foreign" philosophers, and a neutral observer might also suspect that there's a certain Oxford bias involved - until we get to Russell and Wittgenstein there's absolutely no mention of any universities that might have existed in the East of England, and even Hume and Berkeley seem to suffer a bit from their status as remote provincials. Kenny's background seems to creep in in other ways as well - there's a lot more about Augustine and Aquinas than about any Reformation figure. Kenny clearly doesn't approve of the Reformation - he sees the hardening of doctrinal attitudes on both sides as a step backwards from the "patient subtlety which characterised the best scholastics". Erasmus and Grotius are only mentioned in passing, and even Thomas More gets more space than Luther and Calvin.
However, that little bit of personal bias is also one of the real strengths of the book - this isn't merely a neutral account of the subject designed to cram you with information, but it's a critical discussion in which the author doesn't hesitate to point out the strengths and weaknesses of his distinguished predecessors' arguments. As philosophers do, he's trying to provoke the reader into doing some actual thinking. I'm not sure how well that worked for me - there were several points where I found myself promising that I would come back and have another go at that chapter later, especially when it came to Kant.
The stress seems to be on the core subject areas of metaphysics and philosophical logic - other areas like ethics and political philosophy are there, but are covered in rather less detail. Obviously something has to give if you want to make a book that is both accessible and of a manageable size.
But I did come out of the struggle with a few pointers about where I'd like to go next in exploring philosophy, and with a clearer idea of what "philosophy" is and how it's evolved over the last two-and-a-half millennia. So a success, I think!