“The History of Western Philsosophy” by Bertrand Russell
I finally finished this book. I’d been nursing it along for too long, mostly because I was reading (really just starting and not finishing) too many books at the same time. There are many things I liked and disliked about the book. Obviously, Russell was a preeminent philosopher of the first rank. His breadth of knowledge was vast and interesting. His bias was obvious in the sections on pre-Socratic and Greek philosophy as well as in some of his critiques of various philosophers. However, despite this fact, he was even-handed in that he criticized everyone to one degree or another, even those he liked. This is evident in the chapters on Marx and Dewey. I appreciated the number of persons and movements which he covered, and I feel like I have a better grasp of the history of philosophy than I had previously obtained through other sources. There were only two main drawbacks to the book, in my opinion. First, the book is obviously outdated already since it doesn’t cover anyone or anything of more recent development. While this shortcoming is unavoidable due to the fact that he died before the most recent developments of modern philosophy, I was a bit surprised to find that no mention was made of Wittgenstein, Ayer, Jaspers, Existentialism per se, Logical Positivism, etc. The last chapter on Logical Analysis very briefly mentioned Carnap, Whitehead, Frege and Russell himself. The second drawback was the section on Medieval Philosophy. While I appreciated the amount of historical background that was offered, I eventually lost interest in the sheer mass of names of kings and popes. Some details were interesting, and the general perception of the formative power struggles was adequately conveyed, but the book seemed to be a bit redundant at this point. Of course this is probably more indicative of me than the book. Also, more attention seemed to be devoted to historical and biographical events than to the actual thoughts of some of the philosophers and movements covered. Overall the book suffers from an imbalance between biographical and content analysis in different parts of it. As an example, Kant’s transcendental argument is critiqued in only one paragraph on the basis of geometry, and yet Bergson’s philosophy of time and space is given pages of analysis. I may be mistaken, but I think Kant has been more influential than Bergson. Russell didn’t even like Bergson and totally rejects him by the end of the chapter. The attention given to biographical and historical events is due to Russell’s agreement with Marx about the influence of such things on persons and ideas (as Russell himself notes in the chapter on Marx). In the end the book is an excellent read and well worth the time and money. It is well deserving of the title “classic” and will remain on my philosophy bookshelf.
“Wittgenstein” by AC Grayling
This was a very breif, yet very helpful, book. It begins with a short biographical section and then divides the analysis of Wittgenstein’s thought into early and later philosophy. After the analysis of both sections of his writing career, Grayling concludes the book with an assesment of Wittgenstein’s influence on contemporary philosophical thought. Grayling is tough on Wittgenstein and doesn’t have much regard for his views, however his critique was helpful in giving a balance to some of the possibly exaggerated claims about Wittgenstein. The section on early philosophy focuses on the Tractatus, while the section on later philosophy deals with the themes dominant in the Grammar, Blue and Brown Books, Investigations, and On Certainty. Even though Wittgenstein seems to have wanted to avoid building a system of thought in his later work, Grayling does a nice job of synthesizing the material and showing the connections inherent in the works mentioned, as well as the connections between both stages of Wittgenstein’s writing career. As I said at the beginning, the book is brief and helpful, even if one doesn’t agree with Grayling’s general assesment of Wittgenstein.
