This book is a guide to all of Western philosophy - the ideas that have supported our civilization for two and a half thousand years. Anthony Kenny tells the story of philosophy from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment to the modern world. He introduces readers to the great thinkers and their ideas, starting with Plato, Aristotle, and other founders of Western thought.

In the second part of the book, he guides us through a thousand years of medieval philosophy and shows us the rich spiritual heritage of Christian thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, and Occam. Moving towards early modernity, we explore the great works of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant, which remain essential reading today.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein transformed the way we see the world.

The book presents certain themes that have been constant concerns of philosophy since its early steps: fundamental questions about what exists and how we can know it; the nature of humanity, mind, truth, and meaning; the place of God in the universe; how we should live and how society should be organized. Anthony Kenny traces the development of these themes over the centuries: we see how the questions raised and the answers offered by great philosophers of the past remain alive and relevant today.

Anyone interested in ideas and their history will find this reading both interesting and provocative.

• Pages: 1088
• Dimensions: 16.2x16.2cm