Question What are the most notable and the best books with the subject : "history of philosophy", that can be used as a reliable reference?

Accepted:
November 17, 2009

Comments

Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy immediately comes to mind.

Russell's book is lively, but not that reliable. The best one-volume history of philosophy I've found is A Brief History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny, which is accessible but sophisticated and concise yet comprehensive.

Unlike Russell, Kenny develops develop a sophisticated historiography that draws helpfully from wider cultural and historical events and trends. This gives his text a much more interestingly nuanced view than is normal in introductory histories of philosophy.

The book is entertaining and deeply informative -- and I consider it the very best of its genre! Here's an Amazon link (note -- the text I have mind is the one published by Blackwell in 1998; Kenny has published other histories of philosophy since then that I don't like as much):

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0631201327

One more thought: if you are interested in twentieth century analytic philosophy, Scott Soames' two-volume history provides clear and reasonably reliable interpretations of the history of some of the movements within that tradition.

Even though Soames does not provide a full or completely satisfactory history of analytic philosophy--his central narrative focuses narrowly on those treatments of the analytic/synthetic, necessary/contingent, and apriori/aposteriori distinctions that are most closely connected to Saul Kripke's celebrated work in Naming and Necessity, and the emphasis he places on the historical significance of Kripke's achievements creates some some significant gaps and oversimplifications--these texts are extremely engaging and reading them can be a good way to gain sophisticated introductory knowledge about some vital figures in recent philosophical history:

Soames, Scott, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The Dawn of Analysis. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) http://books.google.com/books?id=sS_lToqtGrIC&pgis=1.

Soames, Scott, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: The Age of Meaning. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) http://books.google.com/books?id=M5umcZlECGQC&pgis=1.

Of the three histories listed so far, my assessment is that Russell's is the least reliable (but most fun to read), Kenny's is the most reliable and employs the best historiography (and so is the best elementary introduction to many Western philosophical traditions), and Soames offers the most sophisticated discussion of a much more limited range of figures and themes.

Question What are the most notable and the best books with the subject : "history of philosophy", that can be used as a reliable reference? Accepted:November 17, 2009

Question What are the most notable and the best books with the subject : "history of philosophy", that can be used as a reliable reference?

Accepted:
November 17, 2009