A masterly distillation of two-and-a-half millennia of intellectual history, and a readable and entertaining crash course in Western philosophy

Short, sharp, and entertaining, this survey covers the development of all aspects of the
Western philosophical tradition from the ancient Greeks to the present day. No major representative of any significant strand of Western thought escapes the author's attention: the Christian Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, the German idealists from Kant to Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham and Mill; the...

Thedevelopment of modern thought is tracedthrough a sequence of accessible profiles of the most influential thinkers in every domain of intellectual endeavor since 1789

No major representative of post-Enlightenment thought escapes Trombley's attention in this history: the German idealists Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham and Mill; the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; Kierkegaard and the existentialists; founders of new fields of inquiry such as Weber, Durkheim, and C.S. Peirce; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore, Whitehead, and...