impressive coverage of mostly Western philosophy but nice summary of other traditions at the end
I don't remember when I started this massive book, I'm going to say three years, so I feel I should begin a reread, but I probably won't. Nevertheless, I remember I really liked the early history of philosophy, really Western philosophy (so you could think of this as a modern refresher of Russell's classic), slogged through the navel-gazing modern philosophy but perked up when we got to modern political philosophy starting with Rawls, which is pretty much a repetition of my experience with a philosophy minor in college. My favorite section is actually the ending chapters that quickly survey non-Western philosophy traditions, are what could be argued as such, such as from China and Africa, which the author hastens to disclaim he's not an expert in, but it's a lot more than I've seen in other histories of philosophy. Plus a primer on formal logic, which it's sad to say …
I don't remember when I started this massive book, I'm going to say three years, so I feel I should begin a reread, but I probably won't. Nevertheless, I remember I really liked the early history of philosophy, really Western philosophy (so you could think of this as a modern refresher of Russell's classic), slogged through the navel-gazing modern philosophy but perked up when we got to modern political philosophy starting with Rawls, which is pretty much a repetition of my experience with a philosophy minor in college. My favorite section is actually the ending chapters that quickly survey non-Western philosophy traditions, are what could be argued as such, such as from China and Africa, which the author hastens to disclaim he's not an expert in, but it's a lot more than I've seen in other histories of philosophy. Plus a primer on formal logic, which it's sad to say is probably introduced these days more by programming languages than schooling (I learned boolean logic in digital design courses before taking a logic course from the philosophy department and the engineering class was better). The book ends with a nicely categorized bibliography, so I guess I don't actually need to read this book again, I can go to the sources (time to break out the Rawls again).