This book is no less than a guide to the whole of Western philosophy - the ideas that have undergirded our civilization for two-and-a-half thousand years. Anthony Kenny tells the story of philosophy from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment into the modern world. He
introduces us to the great thinkers and their ideas, starting with Plato, Aristotle, and the other founders of Western thought. In the second part of the book he takes us through a thousand years of medieval philosophy, and shows us the rich intellectual legacy of Christian thinkers like Augustine,
Aquinas, and Ockham. Moving into the early modern period, we explore the great works of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant, which remain essential reading today. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein again transformed the
way we see the world.
Running though the book are certain themes which have been constant concerns of philosophy since its early beginnings: the fundamental questions of what exists and how we can know about it; the nature of humanity, the mind, truth, and meaning; the place of God in
the universe; how we should live and how society should be ordered. Anthony Kenny traces the development of these themes through the centuries: we see how the questions asked and answers offered by the great philosophers of the past remain vividly alive today.
Anyone interested in ideas
and their history will find this a fascinating and stimulating read.
Part I: Ancient Philosophy
1. Beginnings: From Pythagoras to Plato
2. Schools of Thought: From Aristotle to Augustine
3. Argument and Reason: Logic
4. Knowledge and its Limits
5. How Things Happen: Physics
6. What There Is: Metaphysics
7. Soul and Mind
8.
How to Live: Ethics
9. God
Part II: Medieval Philosophy
10. Philosophy and Faith: Augustine to Maimonides
11. The Schoolmen: From the Twelfth Century to the Renaissance
12. Logic and Language
13. Knowledge
14. Physics
15. Metaphysics
16. Mind and
Soul
17. Ethics
18. God
Part III: The Rise of Modern Philosophy
19. Sixteenth-Century Philosophy
20. Descartes to Berkeley
21. Hume to Hegel
22. Knowledge
23. Physics
24. Metaphysics
25. Mind and Soul
26. Ethics
27. Political Philosophy
28.
God
Part IV: Philosophy in the Modern World
29. From Bentham to Nietzsche
30. From Peirce to Strawson
31. From Freud to Derrida
32. Logic
33. Language
34. Epistemology
35. Metaphysics
36. Philosophy of Mind
37. Ethics
38. Aesthetics
39.
Politics
40. God
Chronology
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Sir Anthony Kenny has been President of the British Academy, and Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford. He has written many books on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy, including both scholarly and popular works on Aristotle, Aquinas,
Descartes, and Wittgenstein.
