A New History of Western Philosophy: In Four Parts

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More importantly, he presented the materials under very critical scrutiny, so that the narrative is filled with shrewd observations. 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. A textbook detailing the history of western philosophy by breaking it apart into digestible and accessible parts. Plato and Aristotle were not the high point and originators of philosophy for no reason, but they were part of a Greek culture that, in some ways, was more advanced than the world in which we live today - e.

The middle ages saw a great flourishing of philosophy, and the intellectual endeavour of the era reaches its climax in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the systems of the greatschoolmen such as Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus.The Greek philosopher section was pretty dense as he was condensing a lot of information into those pages. This is not simply a chronology of famous names and dates or a series of biographical notes; it is very much a history of the ideas themselves, told in an objective, concise and, occasionally, witty manner. The overviews are unsatisfying - staccato jumps from philosopher to philosopher that fail to develop a narrative of the progression of the ideas - and the thematic sections are short and dense, a terrible way to convey some very technical philosophy (Kant’s monumental metaphysical system is given just three pages, or seven if you count the four pages of jargon-heavy exposition that Kenny inexplicably allows into the overview section on Kant). Critics claim Kenny's account of philosophy, while generally good, is quite limited in the Islamic world, focusing only on those works that became important in the Latin tradition. I should note at the outset that I have not read the preceding three volumes and so I cannot comment on the extent to which the present volume dovetails with the previous ones, nor can I judge its success at bringing the series to a conclusion.

Kenny addresses "the question of whether belief in God, and faith in a divine world, is a reasonable or rational state of mind.Finally, though Saul Kripke is briefly discussed in the section of the logic chapter devoted to modality, the language chapter would have profited from further attention to his (and Hilary Putnam's) notion of direct reference. The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. During the 2000s Kenny wrote a history of Western philosophy, released in four parts from 2004 to 2007; the four books were released together as A New History of Western Philosophy in 2010. Kenny initially trained as a Roman Catholic priest at the Venerable English College, Rome, where he received a degree of Licentiate of Sacred Theology (STL) degree.

This section merely serves to provide a very short summary of the ideas that will be elaborated in the later thematic chapters. Depending on the different periods, some topics were treated extensively, while others disappeared totally.That Kenny found no place for further discussion of Sartre's views in, for example, the chapters devoted to the philosophy of mind and to ethics does both Sartre and his own exposition a disservice. Far better to read a Stanford Encyclopaedia article on the philosophers individually, in conjunction with overviews of periods that interest you. Beyond single book histories, arguably the gold standard for thoroughness is the series by Copleston.