STEPHEN TOULMIN George Santayana used to insist that those who are ignorant of the history of thought are doomed to re-enact it. To this we can add a corollary: that those who are ignorant of the context of ideas are doom- ed to misunderstand them. In a few self-contained fields such as pure mathematics, concepts and conceptual systems can perhaps be de- tached from their historico-cultural situations; so that (for instance) a self-taught Ramanujan, living alone in India, mastered number- theory to a point at which he could make major contributions to European mathematics. But elsewhere the...

This seventh edition of The Study of Philosophy presents a comprehensive treatment of the major fields and figures of philosophy alongside primary readings by seminal thinkers to fuel debate and further study. New features of this edition include -a substantive account of philosophical theology -a reorganized treatment of early modern rationalism and empiricism -discussion of the major highlights of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy -a survey of major contemporary moral problems From Plato to Plantinga, from Aristotle to Ayer, and from Socrates to Singer, this text brings the...