The Oxford Illustrated History Of Western Philosophy

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: Fine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publisher Place: Usa
Publisher Year: 1994
Edition: First Edition

Description: 407 pages. Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: From Platos Republic and St. Augustines Confessions through Marxs Capital and Sartres Being and Nothingness , the extraordinary philosophical dialogue between great Western minds has flourished unabated through the ages. Dazzling in its genius and breadth, the long line of European andAmerican intellectual discourse tells a remarkable story--a quest for truth and wisdom that continues to shape our most basic ideas about human nature and the world around us. That quest is brilliantly brought to life in The Oxford History of Western Philosophy .Featuring hundreds of spectacular illustrations--including sixteen pages of full-color plates--this splendidly written volume takes the reader on a magnificient chronological tour through the revolutions of thought that have forged the Western philosophical tradition from ancient times to thepresent. Throughout, the six contributors--an internationally renowned team of philosophers including Roger Scruton, Anthony Quinton, and Anthony Kenny--bring the astonishingly diverse, wide-ranging landscape of intellectual history into sharp focus, emphasizing how notions seen today as part of aninevitable march of ideas were in their own time often considered radical, if not revolutionary. Thus we are treated, for example, to lively accounts of how Platos "theory of forms" and Aristotles pioneering exercises in logic broke with the past to irrevocably alter the course of Western thought.The authors also reveal the relationships between landmark thinkers, and the ways they drew on their intellectual heritage. They show, for instance, how St. Augustine and Aquinas, though advancing the cause of Christian doctrine, picked up where their pagan Greek forebears had left off. We witnesshow, during the Renaissance, the profound empiricist ideas underlying Descartes famous utterance--"I think, therefore I exist"--lived in a tense but complementary relationship with Lockes rationalist theories. Moving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book explores how Hume greatlyinfluenced Kants conception of the "transcendental aesthetic," and how Hegel drew upon the lesser known (but groundbreaking) work of Fichte and Schelling. The authors bring the story up to our own time, vividly recounting the existential trend from Nietzsche ("God is dead") to Sartre, along withother increasingly fractious schools of thought. Along the way, we not only encounter the vast intellectual riches of the Western mind, but we also meet the personalities behind the great thoughts, from the saintly Hume (described by Adam Smith as having "come as near to perfection as anybodycould") to the ill-mannered outcast Fichte. And the hundreds of maps and striking illustrations (including full-color reproductions of art ranging from medieval manuscripts to the works of Raphael, Ingres, and Magritte) form an integral part of the book, revealing the interweaving of art and ideasthrough the ages, as artists have striven to give visual immediacy to philosophical concepts.The Oxford History of Western Philosophy is the most authoritative single-volume account ever written for the general reader. Engagingly written and astonishingly far-reaching, it provides the consummate introduction to the intellectual bedrock upon which Western civilization is built.

ISBN: 9780198242789