![]() We should all look forward to his projected next volume, taking philosophy's story forward from Immanuel Kant. That would have allowed highlighting inductive thinking to accompany Descartes's rationalism, even if Gottlieb is right that Bacon was not the stock empiricist he's often made out to be. And while Gottlieb acknowledges that "all histories of philosophy are selective," his might advantageously have included more on another Brit, Francis Bacon. British philosophers get the most attention, with the longest chapters going to Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. ![]() No small task, but one accomplished with delightfully economical prose. Gottlieb attempts to understand "these pioneers" by "step back into their shoes." He unpacks their major philosophical ideas from within the contexts of their lives and times and also traces their subsequent scholarly receptions. Western philosophy is now two-and-a-half millennia old, but much of it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150 years. ![]() Here, there are individual chapters on René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Pierre Bayle, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, David Hume, and other French philosophers. The Dream of Enlightenment discusses the key figures in the second great flowering of Western philosophy, in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. The author of the classic The Dream of Reason vividly explains the rise of modern thought. ![]() Gottlieb (former executive editor, the Economist) provides a sequel to The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. ![]()
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