A concise, lucid survey of philosophical thinking from the early Greeks through Kant, concentrating on the evolution of the central problems of philosophy. Concerned solely with giving the student a meaningful overview of developments in philosophy, it reflects the work of a distinguished philosopher and provides an ideal guide for an undergraduate's first encounter with the sources of western thought.
Chaïm Perelman was a Polish-born philosopher of law, who studied, taught, and lived most of his life in Brussels. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique (1958), with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (1969).