Why this book?
- To gain an orderly picture of the course of Western philosophy from Thales to contemporary philosophy.
- To read a history that attends both to historical context and to philosophical analysis.
- To become familiar with classical, medieval, early modern, and contemporary analytic philosophers.
- For students and interested readers who want to read the history of philosophy in a problem-oriented way.
About the book
Anthony Kenny’s History of Western Philosophy is one of the few multi-volume histories of philosophy written by a single author, and this gives it a distinctive narrative and analytical coherence. In this series, Kenny treats the history of philosophy not merely as a record of philosophers’ lives and doctrines, but as a field for rethinking enduring philosophical problems.
The book covers four main periods: ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, the rise of modern philosophy, and modern and contemporary philosophy. In each volume, Kenny follows the historical sequence of philosophers and schools while also devoting thematic chapters to topics such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, logic, and political philosophy. This combination of historical and thematic approaches helps the reader see both the sequence of ideas and the continuity of problems across different periods.
The importance of this series lies in its method of writing the history of philosophy. Kenny believes that a historian of philosophy must be both a historian and a philosopher: one must understand the social and intellectual context of each idea and also evaluate the arguments. For this reason, the book is suitable for philosophy students, teachers, translators, and serious readers of philosophy, especially those who want to read the history of philosophy not as memorized information but as an exercise in thinking.
Every important history of philosophy must itself be an exercise in philosophy, just as it is also an exercise in history.
From the table of contents
- 1Ancient Philosophy
- 2Medieval Philosophy
- 3The Rise of Modern Philosophy
- 4Modern Philosophy
