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History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [1]

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Opinions

14 Plato's Utopia

15 The Theory of Ideas

16 Plato's Theory of Immortality

17 Plato's Cosmogony

18 Knowledge and Perception in Plato

19 Aristotle's Metaphysics

20 Aristotle's Ethics

21 Aristotle's Politics

22 Aristotle's Logic

23 Aristotle's Physics

24 Early Greek Mathematics and Astronomy

PART III Ancient Philosophy after Aristotle

25 The Hellenistic World

26 Cynics and Sceptics

27 The Epicureans

28 Stoicism

29 The Roman Empire in Relation to Culture

30 Plotinus

BOOK TWO Catholic Philosophy

Introduction

PART I The Fathers

1 The Religious Development of the Jews

2 Christianity During the First Four Centuries

3 Three Doctors of the Church

4 St Augustine's Philosophy and Theology

5 The Fifth and Sixth Centuries

6 St Benedict and Gregory the Great

PART II The Schoolmen

7 The Papacy in the Dark Ages

8 John the Scot

9 Ecclesiastical Reform in the Eleventh Century

10 Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy

11 The Twelfth Century

12 The Thirteenth Century

13 St Thomas Aquinas

14 Franciscan Schoolmen

15 The Eclipse of the Papacy

BOOK THREE Modern Philosophy

PART I From the Renaissance to Hume

1 General Characteristics

2 The Italian Renaissance

3 Machiavelli

4 Erasmus and More

5 The Reformation and Counter-Reformation

6 The Rise of Science

7 Francis Bacon

8 Hobbes's Leviathan

9 Descartes

10 Spinoza

11 Leibniz

12 Philosophical Liberalism

13 Locke's Theory of Knowledge

14 Locke's Political Philosophy

15 Locke's Influence

16 Berkeley

17 Hume

Part II From Rousseau to the Present Day

18 The Romantic Movement

19 Rousseau

20 Kant

21 Currents of Thought in the Nineteenth Century

22 Hegel

23 Byron

24 Schopenhauer

25 Nietzsche

26 The Utilitarians

27 Karl Marx

28 Bergson

29 William James

30 John Dewey

31 The Philosophy of Logical Analysis

INDEX

* * *

PREFACE


A few words of apology and explanation are called for if this book is to escape even more severe censure than it doubtless deserves.

Apology is due to the specialists on various schools and individual philosophers. With the possible exception of Leibniz, every philosopher of whom I treat is better known to some others than to me. If, however, books covering a wide field are to be written at all, it is inevitable, since we are not immortal, that those who write such books should spend less time on any one part than can be spent by a man who concentrates on a single author or a brief period. Some, whose scholarly austerity is unbending, will conclude that books covering a wide field should not be written at all, or, if written, should consist of monographs by a multitude of authors. There is, however, something lost when many authors co-operate. If there is any unity in the movement of history, if there is any intimate relation between what goes before and what comes later, it is necessary, for setting this forth, that earlier and later periods should be synthesized in a single mind. The student of Rousseau may have difficulty in doing justice to his connection with the Sparta of Plato and Plutarch; the historian of Sparta may not be prophetically conscious of Hobbes and Fichte and Lenin. To bring out such relations is one of the purposes of this book, and it is a purpose which only a wide survey can fulfil.

There are many histories of philosophy, but none of them, so far as I know, has quite the purpose that I have set myself. Philosophers are both effects and causes: effects of their social circumstances and of the politics and institutions of their time; causes (if they are fortunate) of beliefs which mould the politics and institutions of later ages. In most histories of philosophy, each philosopher appears as in a vacuum; his opinions are set forth unrelated except, at most, to those of earlier philosophers. I have tried, on the contrary, to exhibit each philosopher, as far as truth permits, as an outcome of his milieu, a man in whom were crystallized and concentrated thoughts and feelings which, in a vague and diffused form, were common to the community of which he was a part.

This has required the

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