Why this book?
- For a historical and systematic introduction to Western philosophy in Persian.
- To understand Mohammad-Ali Foroughi's role in transmitting modern philosophical concepts to Iran.
- To recognize the relationship between wisdom, philosophy, science, and modernity at the dawn of contemporary Iranian thought.
- To study one of the important sources of Western studies in contemporary Iranian intellectual culture.
- To access Descartes' “Discourse on Method” alongside the main text of the book.
About the book
“The History of Philosophy in Europe” is a foundational work in the history of Iranians' encounter with Western philosophy. In this book, Mohammad-Ali Foroughi has endeavored to explain the main current of European thought from ancient Greek philosophy to the modern period in Persian, providing an intelligible and pedagogical expression for concepts that had no clear precedent in the Persian language.
The book is arranged in three volumes. The first volume begins with the pre-Socratic sages and continues through Plato, Aristotle, Alexandrian wisdom, the Middle Ages, Scholasticism, the Renaissance, Bacon, and Descartes. The second volume addresses philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Spinoza, Leibniz, the English philosophers, French thinkers, and Kant. The third volume follows the path of European philosophy in the nineteenth century.
The importance of this book is not merely in its report on the history of philosophy; through writing it, Foroughi shaped a part of the new Persian philosophical language. He presented Western philosophy not simply as a translation, but with an effort to explain, find equivalents, and bring concepts closer to the Iranian mind and language.