Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. The Story of Philosophy: Few write for the non-specialist as well as Will Durant, and this book is a splendid example o A brilliant and concise account of the lives and ideas of the great philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Croce, Russell, Santayana, James, and Dewey— The Story of Philosophy is one of the great books of our time.
Few write for the non-specialist as well as Will Durant, and this book is a splendid example of his eminently readable scholarship. Paperback , pages. Published January 1st by Pocket Books first published To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Story of Philosophy , please sign up. Andrew Hanna i got mine from "sour el azbakya" ,. See all 6 questions about The Story of Philosophy…. Lists with This Book. Oct 25, Riku Sayuj rated it it was amazing Shelves: This was a long postponed book as I always thought it would be a long and trudging read, hard to comprehend and harder to remember afterwards.
But Durant's treatment of the philosophers and their ideas as organic evolutions of their character and their times was what made the book a joy to read. The ideas and the long dead philosophers come alive magnificently in these pages and Durant even manages to fill one with the thirst to go ahead and read all these works that are compressed and presented This was a long postponed book as I always thought it would be a long and trudging read, hard to comprehend and harder to remember afterwards.
The ideas and the long dead philosophers come alive magnificently in these pages and Durant even manages to fill one with the thirst to go ahead and read all these works that are compressed and presented here. This is one of those books which takes a long time to read not because they are long and arduous but because you end up spending more time thinking about each section than in the reading. The best part of the book was the fact that wherever possible the ideas are put forth in the philosopher's own words without commentary or interpretation marring the expostulation.
With the right mix of history, biography and philosophy, Durant has achieved a wonderful synthesis and summary of the evolution of thought. It leaves one with a tantalizing glimpse of great minds and a partial open door through which is too filled with riches to be left unexplored. View all 13 comments. The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers is a book by Will Durant, in which he profiles several prominent Western philosophers and their ideas, beginning with Socrates and Plato and on through Friedrich Nietzsche. Durant attempts to show the interconnection of their ideas and how one philosopher's ideas informed the next.
Feb 04, Jessica rated it it was amazing. This is the most sensitive look at philosophy I've ever read. Will Durant is brilliant-- and who wasn't touched by his heartfelt dedication to his wife at the beginning? I think what really set this book apart is Durant's inclusion of just enough biographical information of the philosophers to remind you that they were just people like you and me who happened to think deep, amazing things about life and were deeply affected by their own childhoods and personal lives, i. Nietzsche and his less This is the most sensitive look at philosophy I've ever read.
Nietzsche and his less than sparkling love-life! This is the book that made me fall in love with philosophy. I consider this to be in my top 5 favorite books of all time. When I first read this book, i had borrowed it from my library and I remember that it was such a beautiful hard-cover edition with an elegant binding that made the pages uneven but gorgeous.
Even the pages themselves had a lovely, aged feel to them due to their thickness. Looking back, I realize that instead of checking it out 11 times that year, I should have just stolen it yes! The story inside dazzles your mind, but how i miss the edition that felt so good to hold. View all 8 comments. Sep 30, Trevor rated it liked it Shelves: This is quite a conservative history of philosophy. Of the m This is quite a conservative history of philosophy. Of the main chapters, about fifty pages are dedicated to the key philosophers I've listed.
One of the underlying themes here is that Plato was right that the best form of society is an aristocracy. We need to be ruled by the best people.
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Well, this is hardly contentious in one sense — better to be ruled by the best of people than the worst — but how we are to go about choosing these best of people is where the problems tend to arise. The interesting thing about this book is that he feels epistemology the theory of how we know stuff has troubled philosophy for far too long and that he felt the time was fast approaching when philosophy would get over epistemology and go back to more worthwhile questions — particularly to do with how to live a good life — ethics. His explanations are always clear and generally also insightful.
Still, as I said, this is a very conservative collection. Hegel gets seven pages and his lack of influence on James is highlighted, but not his very strong influence on Dewey. Dewey gets half the mention of James who gets about half the mention of Santayana, in virtually inverse relation to any current valuation of their worth, I would suspect. I also found it interesting that some philosophers were even selected not sure I would have picked Voltaire in my top ten philosophers for an extended discussion. Books that have extensive chapters on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche like The Consolations of Philosophy say do tend to be more conservative — and, to be honest, I did find myself getting a bit bored hearing their views rehearsed yet again.
Still, he does sound particularly interesting and I have been meaning to read his Ethics for years — I even have it on my bookshelf waiting, always waiting… It's a good thing Spinoza is so patient. View all 11 comments. Dec 01, Roy Lotz rated it it was ok Shelves: The Story tried to salt itself with a seasoning of humor, not only because wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment, but because a sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.
A while ago, as I began to set about learning philosophy, I bought a used copy of this book, but I never got around to reading it.
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The book sat, unread, on my shelves for a few years, its yellowed pages only growing more yellow, and its already cracked a The Story tried to salt itself with a seasoning of humor, not only because wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment, but because a sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.
The book sat, unread, on my shelves for a few years, its yellowed pages only growing more yellow, and its already cracked and broken spine castigating me from my bookshelf every time I passed by. About four or five months ago, I finally decided to get down to it; but I quickly lost interest. This difficulty in finishing is the clearest indication of how I felt about it: Simply put, this is both a poor history of philosophy, and a poor introduction to it.
The book fails to convey adequately what philosophy is, what philosophers do, and how philosophy developed. There is little of intellectual or academic interest in these pages, and despite its eloquence I often managed to find it quite dull. The trouble comes early on, when Durant makes this announcement: The author believes that epistemology has kidnapped modern philosophy, and well nigh ruined it; he hopes for the time when the study of the knowledge-process will be recognized as the business of psychology, and when philosophy will again be understood as the synthetic interpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and process of experience itself.
The absurdity of the above paragraph is obvious to anyone who has read a fair share of philosophy. Writing a history of philosophy while omitting epistemology is like writing a history of chemistry while refusing to talk about chemical bonds. Epistemology is a central part of philosophy, and, besides, a central concern of the greatest modern philosophers; so any treatment of the subject lacking epistemology is doomed to miss the mark.
Besides this, I would also like to point out that the above quote reveals an intellectual weakness as well. How could epistemology be the subject of psychology, a science? So already Durant is showing himself to be a poor philosopher, as well as a poor historian.
In this book, philosophers are artists, not thinkers. Although Durant would have you believe that this is the wise and cosmopolitan perspective on the matter, this fails completely to do justice to these men. Philosophy is, among other things, the art of argumentation. Philosophers—good philosophers, at least—are extremely focused on the logical reasons for their beliefs.
And why do you mean it that way? The final goal of the philosopher is to harbor no dogmatic opinions—and by dogmatic I mean opinions that are accepted without scrutiny—but rather to probe and investigate every assumption, idea, and goal in life. This emphasis on reason and argument is what separates philosophy from philosophizing; but you will find almost exclusively the latter in this book. This book was originally published as a series of pamphlets for the Blue Book series, which were inexpensive paperbacks for worker education.
This origin largely explains why this book contains such a huge chronological leap, from Aristotle all the way to Francis Bacon, and also why Durant continually emphasizes the practical over the theoretical, the biographical over the intellectual.
Much better would have been a chapter on John Locke, who formulated many of the ideas later endorsed by Voltaire, and John Stuart Mill, a contemporary of Herbert Spencer who has had a much more lasting effect on the subsequent history of philosophy. The only place that Durant surpasses Russell is in his chapter on Kant, which I think is a truly excellent piece of work, and a good place to start for any students seeking to understand that obscure German metaphysician.
Other than this brief flash of sunlight, the rest of this book is nothing but passing storm clouds, rumbling ominously, constantly threatening to rain, and yet passing overhead with nary a drop, leaving us as parched as they found us. View all 7 comments. View all 9 comments.
A few years ago, as I began teaching myself philosophy, I bought a used copy of this book. But I could never seem to get around to it. So its yellowed pages only grew more yellow, and its already cracked and broken spine castigated me from my bookshelf e The Story tried to salt itself with a seasoning of humor, not only because wisdom is not wise if it scares away merriment, but because a sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.
So its yellowed pages only grew more yellow, and its already cracked and broken spine castigated me from my bookshelf every time I passed by.
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Thus, to relieve my conscience, I finally decided to dive in; but I quickly lost interest. Even more shocking is Durant's treatment of the entire middle ages. It is in fact a non-treatment. Without explanation other than that Durant doesn't think it is important we skip over nearly a thousand years of Western thought and quickly find ourselves studying the philosophy of Francis Bacon. One could read this book without being aware of philosophers such as Anselm, Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and many others not to mention the Islamic philosophers of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
When we come to post-medieval philosophy, while we are treated to a fairly detailed explication of Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, and Kant, Durant doesn't even mention Descartes sometimes regarded as the father of modern philosophy or the British Empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume except by way of extremely brief references when presenting the thought of other philosophers.
Durant does somewhat better in describing the major figures of nineteenth century philosophy. Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche are all given extensive space. However, Durant spends an inordinate amount of time describing the thought of Herbert Spencer, who today is nearly forgotten. Does all this mean this book is not worth reading? I've given it Four Stars, for the reasons stated earlier.
It does cover the thought of certain philosophers in a way that is reasonably complete for an overview and relatively easy to understand. However, one should not read this book as though it were a general introduction to the story of philosophy. Mass Market Paperback Verified Purchase. Like religion or science or anything else, there is no need to completely understand philosophy it in order to find pleasure in it. Will Durant is an amazing writer who brings joy and understanding to the history of some of the world's greatest minds, and how they painted God, human nature, politics and wisdom in general.
This work is amazing! This work is a gem. The expressions and choice of words makes this really poetry. If the quality of communication is what makes something a work of art LRH, "Art" , then this book qualifies as enduring art. Furthermore, there is this pervading earnestness that only comes from one who is invested in what he writes about; it is no mere intellectual juggernaut tour de force. Mind you, a dictionary must be kept close at hand to look up the words that may not be clearly understood in order to imbibe its nectar.
It may not be light reading--but it is magnificent reading! This book is an exemplar of a quote by Leonardo in the "Introduction," "the noblest pleasure, the joy of understanding. I read this when I was in high school, so it was my introduction to philosophy. I didn't understand much of it at the time, but stuck with philosophy and history where Durant was also a major figure for me in college and went on to teach both subjects.
I bought this as a present for a young friend just entering high school and have told him it presents many windows.
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They will be dark for him now, but gradually he will begin to see wonderful things through some of them. Ariel and will Durant have written many wonderful books but The Story of Philosophy by Will is the epitome of his ability to write a scholarly and complete history of the great minds that have pondered the essence of life. If you have never read anything about philosophy, this the place to start. If you are already a student of that science, this lengthy volume will add to your knowledge.
Durant does not espouse any particular school of philosophy but he lays out the basics of the thinking of the most recognized minds that allows you to make your own judgment. Even if you have only a passing interest in philosophy, get this book and keep it at your bedside.
You will find yourself reading it many more times than you would ever have guessed. This book is wonderful, but if you like this book, avoid the cheap 99 cent version. So many typos, it can be hard to read sometimes. Even the cover reads "Phiosophy" yes, no L in the word! Be aware that there's a much better Kindle version that you can find on Amazon if you search with "Story of Philosophy Simon and Schuster".
It costs a little more, but it's worth it. I'll confess that I don't really remember much at all from this book. It's full of information and it just goes into my eyeballs and doesn't sink in. Will Durant is a good writer, clever and witty. He seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge and I can't imagine the thousands of hours that he spent just acquiring knowledge.
This book is long but not so long that it's overwhelming, not nearly as long as his multivolume history of pretty much everything that he wrote. It's a nice book to get your feet wet on philosophy, that's a good thing isn't it? See all reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.
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