A history of western philosophy, and its connection with political and social circumstances from the earliest times to the present day Hardcover – January 1, 1945

I learned a lot.

A classic by one of the greats. My superlatives would be superfluous. Read it!

a must read for anyone interested in intellectual history

Very nice book!

I used to hate Russell. He comes off being arrogant. But I guess that comes with being a British. But I liked this book. One of those books you hate to underline. I think Russell did a good job for Leibniz. By the way, my eddition the page system is not right.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) was an influential British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and political activist. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in recognition of his many books such as  The Problems of Philosophy , Mysticism and Logic , Why I am Not a Christian , Religion and Science , The Philosophy of Logical Atomism , The Analysis of Mind , Our Knowledge of the External World , Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits , etc. [NOTE; page numbers refer to the 895-page Simon and Schuster hardcover edition.]He wrote in the Preface to this 1945 book, “Many histories of philosophy exist, and it has not been my purpose merely to add one to their number. My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a cause of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished. This purpose demands more account of general history than is usually given by historians of philosophy… One consequence of this point of view is that the importance which it gives to a philosopher is that the importance which it gives to a philosopher is often not that which he deserves on account of his philosophic merit… for example, I consider Spinoza a greater philosopher than Locke, but he was far less influential; I have therefore treated him much more briefly than Locke… very short accounts convey nothing of value to the reader; I have therefore omitted altogether… men who did not seem to me to deserve a fairly full treatment… I have no doubt that every single philosopher whom I have mention, with the exception of Leibniz, is better known to many men than to me… I ask the indulgence of those readers who find my knowledge of this or that portion of my subject less adequate than it would have been had there been no need to remember ‘time’s winged chariot.’”He begins by outlining, “Philosophy… is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been ascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All DEFINITE knowledge… belongs to science; all DOGMA as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries…. The studying of these questions, if not the answering of them, is the business of philosophy.” (Pg. xiii-xiv)He suggests, “There is … a … general argument against reverence, whether for the Greeks or for anyone else. In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble… the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.” (Bk. One, Ch. IV, pg. 39)He points out, “The Greeks in general attached more importance to deduction as a source of knowledge than modern philosophers do. In this respect, Aristotle was less at fault than Plato… Nevertheless, he… gave undue prominence to deduction… We shall agree that Mr. Smith (say) is mortal, and we may, loosely, say that … we know that all men are mortal. But what we really know is not ‘all men are mortal’; we know rather something like ‘all men born more than one hundred and fifty years ago are mortal, and so are almost all men born more than one hundred years ago.’ … But this argument is an induction, not a deduction. It… yields only a probability, not a certainty; but on the other hand it gives NEW knowledge, which deduction does not.” (Ch. XXII, pg. 199)He asserts, “There is little of the true philosophical spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he apparently knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.” (Bk. Two, Ch. XIII, Pg. 463)He comments on Descartes, “The constructive part of Descartes’s theory of knowledge is much less interesting than the earlier destructive part. It uses all sorts of scholastic maxims… no reason is given for accepting these maxims, although they are certainly less evident than one’s own existence… The method of critical doubt, though Descartes himself applied it only half-heartedly, was of great philosophic importance… ‘I think’ is his ultimate premiss. Here the word ‘I’ is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premiss in the form, ‘there are thoughts.’ The word ‘I’ is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum. When he goes on to say ‘I am a THING which thinks,’ he is already using uncritically the apparatus of categories handed down by scholasticism. He nowhere proves that thoughts need a thinker, nor is there reason to believe this except in a grammatical sense.” (Bk. Three, Ch. IX, pg. 567)He says of Hume, “German philosophers, from Kant and Hegel… can be refuted by Humian arguments. Those philosophers who cannot be refuted in this way are those who do not pretend to be rational, such as Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The growth of unreason throughout the nineteenth century and what has passed of the twentieth is a natural sequel to Hume’s destruction of empiricism. It is therefore important to discover whether there is any answer to Hume within the framework of a philosophy that is wholly or mainly empirical. If not, there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity… Hume’s skepticism rests entirely upon his rejection of the principle of induction…If the principle is to be adequate, a sufficient number of instances must make the probability not far short of certainty. If this principle… is true, then the causal inferences which Hume rejects are valid, not indeed as giving certainty, but as giving a sufficient probability for practical purposes. If this principle is not true… Hume’s skepticism is inescapable for am empiricist. The principle itself…must therefore be … deduced from an independent principle not based on experience. To this extent, Hume has proved that pure empiricism is not a sufficient basis for science. But if this one principle is admitted, everything else can proceed… It must be granted that this is a serious departure from pure empiricism, and … [some] may ask why, if one departure is allowed, others are forbidden. These, however, are questions not directly raised by Hume’s arguments. What these arguments prove---and I do not think the proof can be controverted---is that induction is an independent logical principle… and that without this principle science is impossible.” (Ch. XVII, pg. 673-674)He states about Rousseau, “The rejection of reason in favour of the heart was not, to my mind, an advance. In fact, no one thought of this device so long as reason appeared to be on the side of religious belief… there are two objections to the practice of basing beliefs as to objective fact upon the emotions of the heart. One is that there is no reason whatever to suppose that such beliefs will be true; the other is, that the resulting beliefs will be private, since the heart says different things to different people… For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument… to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau. The old arguments at least were honest… But the new theology of the heart … cannot be refuted, because it does not profess to prove its points… if I had to choose between Thomas Aquinas and Rousseau, I should unhesitatingly choose the Saint.” (Ch. XIX, pg. 693-694)He is critical of Nietzsche: “His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. ‘Forget not thy whip’---but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks. He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear .. It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would disguise as lordly indifference.” (Ch. XXV, pg. 767)If one is looking for a “pure,” relatively “objective” history of philosophy, one would be better served by Fr. Copleston’s  A History of Philosophy . Russell’s book is most notably deficient in his dismissive treatment of Medieval Christian philosophy, for example, as well as his ignoring of modern philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre. [But see his more recent  Wisdom of the West .]. But for an absolutely fascinating, lucidly and brilliantly-written survey of philosophy by one who was himself a major philosopher, this book is absolute “must reading.”

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) was an influential British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and political activist. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in recognition of his many books such as  The Problems of Philosophy , Mysticism and Logic , Why I am Not a Christian , Religion and Science , The Philosophy of Logical Atomism , The Analysis of Mind , Our Knowledge of the External World , Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits , etc.He wrote in the Preface to this 1945 book, “Many histories of philosophy exist, and it has not been my purpose merely to add one to their number. My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a cause of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished. This purpose demands more account of general history than is usually given by historians of philosophy… One consequence of this point of view is that the importance which it gives to a philosopher is that the importance which it gives to a philosopher is often not that which he deserves on account of his philosophic merit… for example, I consider Spinoza a greater philosopher than Locke, but he was far less influential; I have therefore treated him much more briefly than Locke… very short accounts convey nothing of value to the reader; I have therefore omitted altogether… men who did not seem to me to deserve a fairly full treatment… I have no doubt that every single philosopher whom I have mention, with the exception of Leibniz, is better known to many men than to me… I ask the indulgence of those readers who find my knowledge of this or that portion of my subject less adequate than it would have been had there been no need to remember ‘time’s winged chariot.’”He begins by outlining, “Philosophy… is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been ascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All DEFINITE knowledge… belongs to science; all DOGMA as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries…. The studying of these questions, if not the answering of them, is the business of philosophy.” (Pg. xiii-xiv)He suggests, “There is … a … general argument against reverence, whether for the Greeks or for anyone else. In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble… the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.” (Bk. One, Ch. IV, pg. 39)He points out, “The Greeks in general attached more importance to deduction as a source of knowledge than modern philosophers do. In this respect, Aristotle was less at fault than Plato… Nevertheless, he… gave undue prominence to deduction… We shall agree that Mr. Smith (say) is mortal, and we may, loosely, say that … we know that all men are mortal. But what we really know is not ‘all men are mortal’; we know rather something like ‘all men born more than one hundred and fifty years ago are mortal, and so are almost all men born more than one hundred years ago.’ … But this argument is an induction, not a deduction. It… yields only a probability, not a certainty; but on the other hand it gives NEW knowledge, which deduction does not.” (Ch. XXII, pg. 199)He asserts, “There is little of the true philosophical spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he apparently knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.” (Bk. Two, Ch. XIII, Pg. 463)He comments on Descartes, “The constructive part of Descartes’s theory of knowledge is much less interesting than the earlier destructive part. It uses all sorts of scholastic maxims… no reason is given for accepting these maxims, although they are certainly less evident than one’s own existence… The method of critical doubt, though Descartes himself applied it only half-heartedly, was of great philosophic importance… ‘I think’ is his ultimate premiss. Here the word ‘I’ is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premiss in the form, ‘there are thoughts.’ The word ‘I’ is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum. When he goes on to say ‘I am a THING which thinks,’ he is already using uncritically the apparatus of categories handed down by scholasticism. He nowhere proves that thoughts need a thinker, nor is there reason to believe this except in a grammatical sense.” (Bk. Three, Ch. IX, pg. 567)He says of Hume, “German philosophers, from Kant and Hegel… can be refuted by Humian arguments. Those philosophers who cannot be refuted in this way are those who do not pretend to be rational, such as Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The growth of unreason throughout the nineteenth century and what has passed of the twentieth is a natural sequel to Hume’s destruction of empiricism. It is therefore important to discover whether there is any answer to Hume within the framework of a philosophy that is wholly or mainly empirical. If not, there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity… Hume’s skepticism rests entirely upon his rejection of the principle of induction…If the principle is to be adequate, a sufficient number of instances must make the probability not far short of certainty. If this principle… is true, then the causal inferences which Hume rejects are valid, not indeed as giving certainty, but as giving a sufficient probability for practical purposes. If this principle is not true… Hume’s skepticism is inescapable for am empiricist. The principle itself…must therefore be … deduced from an independent principle not based on experience. To this extent, Hume has proved that pure empiricism is not a sufficient basis for science. But if this one principle is admitted, everything else can proceed… It must be granted that this is a serious departure from pure empiricism, and … [some] may ask why, if one departure is allowed, others are forbidden. These, however, are questions not directly raised by Hume’s arguments. What these arguments prove---and I do not think the proof can be controverted---is that induction is an independent logical principle… and that without this principle science is impossible.” (Ch. XVII, pg. 673-674)He states about Rousseau, “The rejection of reason in favour of the heart was not, to my mind, an advance. In fact, no one thought of this device so long as reason appeared to be on the side of religious belief… there are two objections to the practice of basing beliefs as to objective fact upon the emotions of the heart. One is that there is no reason whatever to suppose that such beliefs will be true; the other is, that the resulting beliefs will be private, since the heart says different things to different people… For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument… to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau. The old arguments at least were honest… But the new theology of the heart … cannot be refuted, because it does not profess to prove its points… if I had to choose between Thomas Aquinas and Rousseau, I should unhesitatingly choose the Saint.” (Ch. XIX, pg. 693-694)He is critical of Nietzsche: “His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. ‘Forget not thy whip’---but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks. He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear .. It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would disguise as lordly indifference.” (Ch. XXV, pg. 767)If one is looking for a “pure,” relatively “objective” history of philosophy, one would be better served by Fr. Copleston’s  A History of Philosophy . Russell’s book is most notably deficient in his dismissive treatment of Medieval Christian philosophy, for example, as well as his ignoring of modern philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre. [But see his more recent  Wisdom of the West .]. But for an absolutely fascinating, lucidly and brilliantly-written survey of philosophy by one who was himself a major philosopher, this book is absolute “must reading.”

This is an essential starting place for an examination of western thought and history. Russell captures the major thrusts of most of the influential philosophical thinkers shaping western thought. His style is, architypically, Russell through and through, which makes the book fun and easy to read. His logical background tempers his comments and, in my opinion, keeps the treatment of the material unbiased (with the exceptions of Russell's almost tongue and cheek comments on what he considers outlandish thought processes). The sheer scope of the information presented, gives one pause to reflect on Russell's knowledge of the subject. It's no wonder his life demonstrated a lack of fundamental philosophical grounding, but rather celebrated a love of the discovery of life. The subject matter is laid out chronologically and is good night stand reading for the casual reader. A good read for the serious student as well as the general reader.

but what is loss I bet someone found it and then lost it too so if its lost or is it just not found yet and exists in both reality and our dreams as it only exists if it isnt lost,,, I often ponder the heady meady philosophical aspects of reading lost and found it really freaks me out

Essential reading for anyone interested in why we in the west think the way we do. Traces the history of modern thought and how our cultural outlook liberated itself from a dogmatic church controlled view and evolved into the scientific mindset of today. For those with foresight it also gives clues as to where we are heading...

Great book. Very informative

arrived quickly and as described in good condition

One of the greatest books of Russel with key concepts through the history of humanity. Interrelations and links between different time and ideas are very clearly captured.