A History of Western Philosophy
1945
- western influences
- philosophy
- political science
- history
- long now manual for civilization
- filosofie
- western civilization
- histoire
- filosofia (historia)
- philosophie
The story
[The author's] purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a cause of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished.-Pref.
What it’s like
Dense but unhurried expository prose, the kind you sit with at a reading desk rather than skim on a phone. Russell's voice is dry, witty and conversational, full of sharp little asides and deliberate irony, so long chapters move at the pace of a well-argued lecture with the occasional sly aside that makes you laugh out loud. The sensory world is almost entirely intellectual: Greek city-states, medieval monasteries, Enlightenment salons and the sweep of centuries, rendered through ideas and the societies that shaped them rather than through setting or weather. Its mood is cool, wry and quietly curious, with a patient, lightly sceptical warmth and no urgency to it. Emotional stakes are gentle, the drama lives in arguments, and the book carries no violence, gore or sexual content, though it discusses wars, persecutions and political cruelty in measured, historical terms. It suits a rainy Sunday with a pot of tea, a slow evening reread, or an hour-by-hour dip into one chapter at a time. It is for readers who want to see how thinkers and their times fed into each other, and who enjoy a witty, opinionated guide through two and a half thousand years of ideas.
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