The dream of reason
Subtitle: a history of western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
By: Anthony Gottlieb
Edition: New edition, updated.
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 493
ISBN-13: 9780393352986
Subjects: Philosophy; History
Description: Philosophy is a subject with a long history and a short memory. In this landmark new study of Western thought, Anthony Gottlieb looks afresh at the writings of the great thinkers, questions many pieces of conventional wisdom and explains his findings with unbridled brilliance and clarity. From the pre-Socratic philosophers such as Empedocles, whose account of the cosmos seems "a mixture of the physics of Stephen Hawking and the romantic novels of Barbara Cartland," through the celebrated days of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, up to Renaissance visionaries like Erasmus and Bacon, "philosophy" emerges here as a phenomenon unconfined by any one discipline. Indeed, as Gottlieb explains, its most revolutionary breakthroughs in the natural and social sciences have repeatedly been co-opted by other branches of knowledge, leading to the illusion that philosophers never make any progress.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 451-477) and index.
Table of contents: title: PART ONE: The Archetypes, the Milesians; title: The Harmony of the World, the Pythagoreans; title: The Man Who Searched for Himself, Heraclitus; title: The Truth About Nothing, Parmenides; title: The Ways of Paradox, Zeno; title: Love and Strife, Empedocles; title: Mind and Matter, Anaxagoras; title: He Who Laughs Last, Democritus - Opening Pandoras Box, The Sophists; title: PART TWO: Philosophy's Martyr, Socrates and the Socratics; title: The Republic of Reason, Plato; title: The Master of Those Who Know, Aristotle; title: PART THREE: Three Roads to Tranquillity, Epicureans Stoics and Sceptics; title: The Haven of Piety From Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages; title: Voyages of Rediscovery: the Renaissance.