Review: History of Western Philsophy
Reviews January 17th, 2008HoWP by Bertrand Russell is a fairly weighty (700+ pages) epic review of all European and modern American philosophy. Each philosopher covered has some social context and quick biographical detail covered. Russell then describes, as far as he can, the ideas that proved influential and follows up with a critique from his own view. This format works very well for the majority of the book. It may be prone to reading like an inevitable evolution of ideas because important but less famous ideas probably would be omitted. His dry wit and atheistic outlook also appeal to my taste.
This style breaks down in the 19th and 20th centuries because time has not passed to show the ideas in a broad context. Russells own work was in analytic philosophy. Today’s social attitudes still are built on ancient philosophy and only time will tell if analytic philosophy will have a wider cultural impact. We will know in a few hundred years, I’d imagine!
Modern philosophy has been more assimilated into culture by way of existentialism and (dare I say it) post modernism. Admittedly both became more prominent after the book was written. There is hardly a mention in HoWP of either of these movements.
For the chapter on Nietzsche, Russell seems to go slightly off track and verges on ad hominem. He correctly states that Nietzsche’s influence is based on his commentary of culture, philosophy and history. He incorrectly associates Nietzsche with Nazis and mentions them in the same sentence on several occasions – as if he was try to prove guilt by association. This connection was based on what is now thought of as a distortion of Nietzsche’s writings by his sister.
At the end of the book, he says that he thinks progress is being made in philosophy. This progressive concept of knowledge is taken from science (formerly known as natural philosophy) and it rather appeals to me but it is also counter to post modernism. Another underlying(?) theme in the text is every step forward in philosophy and science in the last 400 years has come from questioning past authority – primarily the authority of Plato. For post modernists, who reject that objective progress is meaningful, we can say at least we have greater diversity of views now people can reject Plato without being branded as heretical or impious.
Anti Citizen One
January 18th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
An interesting, thoughtful and thorough review.
I have a copy of HoWP that gathers dust on my shelves, although I do occasionally finger its pages to read up on the ancients.
“His dry wit and atheistic outlook also appeal to my taste.”
Unsuprisingly one of my pet dislikes
His views on Nietzsche were immoveable, perhaps thats why he reverted to ad hominem so often – in order to avoid dealing with the issues directly (who would have won?)
Existentialism and Pomo of course came to prominence (in the sense of literary abundance) after this was written – but I have my doubts that even if he had written about them he would have given anything more than a passing mention – although he may have enjoyed the textualist critiques of deconstruction.
My only real bugbear with Russell is his arrogance (which probably most philosophers require) for example the ease with which he declared the Ontological argument closed… as I mentioned in my post on the matter it was a premature closure (modal logic has progressed beyond Russellian principles).
As a result I tend to view HoWP as being itself a footnote in the history of western philosophy. But this is not to deny that it provides a valuable resource to study.
Although I havent completed my reading of it perhaps a complimentary addition to this book would be the New History of Western Philosophy series… Volume 4 (P in the Modern World) deals more even handedly with Nietzsche.