A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

A Short History of Modern Philosophy is a lucid, challenging and up-to-date survey of the philosophers and philosophies from the founding father of modern philosophy, René Descartes, to the most important and famous philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Roger Scruton has been widely praised for his success in making the history of modern philosophy cogent and intelligible to anyone wishing to understand this fascinating subject.
In this new edition, he has responded to the explosion of interest in the history of philosophy by substantially rewriting the book, taking account of recent debates and scholarship.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Reference, School, Cultural

302 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.

In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband.

In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).

Reviews

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superbly engaging summary of Western philosophy, starting from a brief recap of post-Hellenistic thought (Scruton comes to the defense of the medieval scholastics, showing how their work pre-empted many recent ideas) and then getting into depth from Descartes onwards, culminating in Wittgenstein and the modern conception of philosophy of language. The author's breadth of knowledge is incredible, and he uses his broader understanding of the History of Ideas to inform his portrayal of individual philosophers - showing how Hegel's Idealism was influenced by and influenced German Romaticism, or how Hobbes' skepticism about people's innate goodness emerged from the political turbulence which he experienced.

In a fascinating introduction, he analyses the relation between philosophy and the history of philosophy (a far more critical one than that between, say, physics and the history of physics). Since philosophy is not a progression, but a series of iterations on the same themes, the ideas contained in Plato or Descartes are as relevant today as ever. However, there is an important distinction between the history that is relevant to a philosopher, and that which is of interest to the historian of ideas. The idea, to use Scruton's example, of there being more than one God, while of great historical importance, need no longer detain the student of philosophy for very long.

As one of the most prominent Anglophone philosophers to deal with aesthetics, Scruton is ideally posed to present both the Continental and the Analytical traditions fairly - giving a far more nuanced presentation, for example, of the ideas of Hegel than Bertrand Russell's pugnacious history does. The presence of that latter book appears quite a few times here: Scruton uses Russell as a foil, receiving from him his humourous, clear style, yet maintaining a commitment to a semblance of ecumenicalism.

Still, this book is not entirely without subjectivity. Often Scruton couches his logical flow in a sort of dialectic between a philosopher and a sceptical interlocutor - and shows his own preference by his choice of whom to award the last word. (Sections ending in a philosopher seeming to be a mess of contradictions are dismayingly common.) But it is inevitable that one should show prejudice when schematising a view one finds inadmissible, and Scruton is careful to bring out the heritage of each thinker he presents, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective.

The presentations of Leibniz and Spinoza in particular are a masterwork of clarity, and the section on Kant is as good as can be expected, when dealing with ideas the meaning of which nobody is actually sure. I got bogged down, surprisingly, in the section on Locke and Berkeley. But the book's brevity, felicity of prose and connectedness of ideas helped me get through even the thorniest parts. For a summary of Western philosophy for the informed amateur, I couldn't recommend anything better.

[Stetson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is possible that readers may stumble upon this title and think it is an accessible primer of philosophy starting sometime in the late 19th century. However, that would be quite an errant inference. First, the scope of the work is selectively circumscribed. Scruton dedicates quite a bit of time to justifying why he does this. So instead of a comprehensive and superficial work, it engages more deeply with the ideas and philosophers that meet Scruton's criteria.

Scruton's criteria mostly concern significant metaphysical, ethical, and semantic ideas and influential thinkers who use analytical approaches. Second, as hinted, this work is fairly dense to someone without a strong background in the ideas discussed and actually dialogues with the relevant ideas instead of simply describing them. It simply isn't designed as a history of philosophy in contrast with other similarly titled works. It is a work of historical philosophical commentary written mostly for those with some deep interest and experience with philosophical ideas.

Further, the use of the term "modern" in the title is somewhat misleading. Scruton starts with the philosophical works of the Ancients and Medievalists then makes his way in large jumps to Wittgenstein after dwelling heavily on Enlightenment era thinkers (Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, etc). The use of "modern" also suggested to me that Scruton would include some commentary on aesthetics, but this was unfortunately absent from the work (I originally picked up this work for some commentary on historical aesthetic ideas).

Overall, this was a challenging and engaging read, which I think will reward multiple readings, especially when paired with the relevant primary sources. Although this wasn't exactly the book I was looking for, I found it to be enriching and worthwhile.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scruton, Roger. A Short History of Modern Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2002.

This was a joy to read. Scruton communicates depth with a certain type of elegance rarely matched in academic writers. Bertrand Russell is probably the closest equivalent.

There are several angles from which we can view Scruton’s work. An exhaustive review of each figure and movement would be beyond the scope of this review. Several key themes emerge in Scruton’s narrative. Substance never disappears as a concept, pace modern nominalists. On the other hand, it cannot stand simply in its Aristotelian form. Developments in mathematics, logic, and language require a sharper focus on substance.

First, some comments on Aristotle’s logic. Every proposition contains both subject and predicate, which corresponds to substance and attribute (Scruton 16). Since a substance can have, or perhaps lose, different attributes, a substance is something that survives change. One problem raised is whether substances can cease to exist and what is meant by the term “exist.”

Distinction between stuff and things. Stuff can be measured. Things can be counted. This made the idea of substance rather fuzzy.

The Port Royal Logic

The Jansenist critics of Descartes anticipated several key breakthroughs in logical analysis. They noted the distinction between the intension and extension of a term. The former denotes what a thing is. The latter applies to the set of things: man vs. the class of men.

Leibniz

Gottfried Leibniz emerges as a true champion in this narrative. Spinoza had previously said there was only one substance and an infinity of modes. Leibniz, by contrast, saw reality as reducible to individuals known as “monads,” which Scruton highlights as (68):

1 Monads are not extended in space.
2 Monads are distinguished from one another by their properties (their ‘predicates’).
3 No monad can come into being or pass away in the natural course of things; a monad is created or annihilated only by a ‘miracle’.
4 The predicates of a monad are ‘perceptions’—i.e. mental states—and the objects of these mental states are ideas. Inanimate entities are in fact the appearances of animated things: aggregates of monads, each endowed with perceptions.
5 Not all perceptions are conscious. The conscious perceptions, or apperceptions, are characteristic of rational souls, but not of lesser beings. And even rational souls have perceptions of which they are not conscious.
6 ‘Monads have no windows’—that is, nothing is passed to them from outside; each of their states is generated from their own inner nature.

To be sure, not every organic thing is an individual monad. Most aren’t. Humans, for example, would be aggregates of monads.
Hegel

Scruton’s analysis of Hegel’s logic put the brakes on any Hegelian speculations I might have had. The main difficulty with Hegel, apart from his impenetrable prose, is that his use of terms doesn’t mirror the way the world normally uses such terms. In normal usage, logic is a tool. For Hegel it is almost an active, living entity.

Scruton summarizes the problem in reading Hegel in one elegant, witty passage:

“It is not to be expected that such a logic can readily be made intelligible, or that a philosophy which is able cold-bloodedly to announce (for example) that ‘Limit is the mediation through which Something and Other is and also is not’ should be altogether different from arrant nonsense” (175).

Scruton interrupts his survey after Nietzsche to make a few comments on political philosophy.

For John Locke, when I mix my labor with an object, I make it my own. It becomes my property (206). Locke’s arguments on natural rights are interesting and quite important. Contract theory, however, is built on a much shakier foundation. Scruton identifies several problems. 1) On what grounds do we infer the existence of such a contract? It is almost always an implied contract, if it exists at all. Claims of “tacit consent” are vacuous, as Hume noted. It’s not clear how anyone born in such a society gave “tacit consent.”

Marx takes Hegel’s concept of alienation and comes up with “false consciousness.” Scruton notes that Marx didn’t use alienation all that much later on in life. What is “alienation?” As Scruton observes,

“Under capitalism it is not only objects, but also men, who are bought and sold. And in this buying and selling, under the regime of which one party has nothing to dispose of but his labour power, we reach the ultimate point in the treatment of men as means. Men have become objects for each other, and whatever remnants of their human (social) life remain will be dissipated” (225).

Although such a view is not entirely coherent (and Marx would trade it in for “false-consciousness” later on), it did have imaginative power. A false consciousness, on the other hand, is a universal error one makes in examining the social world. This unhappy consciousness emerges from Marx’s analysis of “base” and “superstructure.”

Following this chapter Scruton examines utilitarianism and British idealism. More pertinent for this review will be Scruton’s analysis of Gottlob Frege’s logical revolution.

Frege

What did Frege do? He overthrew Aristotelian logic. He began by examining J. S. Mill’s claim that arithmetic was abstracted from experience, as in 2+3 = 5. Numbers are empirical aggregates from experience. Frege responded that Mill could give no account of the number zero. Moreover, while I cannot with my senses apprehend a 1,000 sided figure, I am easily prepared to acknowledge such a figure exists. And in the final coup de grace on Mill, Frege notes that induction assumes probability, but probability presupposes arithmetical laws (250).

Frege then asks, “What is a number?” They can’t be a property, since if I say “Socrates is one,” I do not attribute the property of one-ness to Socrates. Nor are they abstractions. If numbers are objects, then we need to be able to locate them, and that entails a host of philosophical headaches.

A more immediate problem, and one for which Frege is ultimately famous, concerns existential quantification. If I say “Unicorns are horned animals,” am I saying that unicorns exist? Frege made it clear that identity and prediction are different.

I don’t feel smart enough to explain what Frege meant by sense and reference, so we will go on to Heidegger, particularly, Scruton’s wonderful rhetorical comments on Heidegger.

“It is impossible to summarise Heidegger’s work, which no one has claimed to understand completely. In the next chapter I shall give reasons for thinking that it may be unintelligible” (268).

“the reader has the impression that never before have so many words been invented and tormented in the attempt to express the inexpressible” (268).

“All these are more or less pompous ways of distinguishing things from persons” (269).

“Heidegger notices and applauds the result, but does not, as he perhaps should, feel threatened by it” (269).

“One thing is clear, which is that Heidegger’s conclusions, where intelligible, are clearly intended as universal truths, not merely about the human condition, but about the world as such” (272).

“Heidegger does not give any arguments for the truth of what he says. Most of Being and Time consists of compounded assertions, with hardly a ‘thus’, ‘therefore’, ‘possibly’, or ‘it might follow that’, to indicate the relations which are supposed to hold between them” (272).

This book was a sheer pleasure to read and absorb. It is easily my favorite text and first recommendation on the history of modern philosophy.

[David Williamson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this much more useful to read than the Bertrand Russel book.

[bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a useful introduction to recent philosophical thought. It certainly recapitulates systems of some major philosophers in a more penetrating manner than the largely superficial overview of Russell’s History. That said, what it provides in depth it sacrifices in both scope and accessibility, so perhaps it’s not the best source for a the nescient layman’s foray into the subject. Additionally, despite his surprising (relatively) fair treatment of philosophers he surely destains, Scruton can’t help but sprinkle a few laughably dismissive and puerile remarks when providing his personal responses at the end of each section. Still, if you can get past the occasional flippant critique of your favorite philosopher (and the author’s glaring personal faults), this book turns out to be a generally respectable distillation of the numerous schools of thought within modern philosophy.

[r0b · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally well explained but uneven in his treatment of those he chose to discuss.

[Adam Marischuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roger Scruton is a man of strong opinions who manages to understand other opinions while not necessarily sharing them

Modern philosophy is a little out of my field, aside from a couple undergraduate classes in modern philosophy, Hume, Kant, Neitzsche and Kierkegaard (many years ago), I have always focused on Medieval philosophy. There were a few philosophers for whom I only had a passing acquaintance before reading this book, a few who were only names and footnotes to me. So I figured I should brush up on it.

I have Copleston's entire 9 volume History of Philosophy set and Bertrand Russell's entertaining History of Western Philosophy but decided to begin my return to modern philosophy with Scruton for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I trust him as a guide. While I found Russell very dismissive of ideas he did not share, and Copleston reads something like Wikipedia, Scruton walks the reader through gently. He allows each thinker to express themselves and he emphasizes each philosophers' contribution to western thought. But he also fairly criticises each philosopher and notes the history of the criticism. The philosophers themselves seem to be in dialogue in this book. But he does not mis the opportunity to interject his own wit and illuminate the discussion in his own way. Scruton's conservativism lends an interesting and amusing undercurrent to the philosophical discussion without becoming distracting:

"Rousseau believed that man is good by nature and made bad only by institutions (A view which most people hold during their adolescence, and which some continue to hold, with varying degrees of hysteria, as they grow older)" (p. 212)

"Utilitarianism and On Liberty-which, like all his master works, hide intense intellectual conflict behind a mask of superficial clarity" (p. 238)

"It is impossible to summarise Heidegger's work, which no one has claimed to understand completely." (p. 270)

Secondly, I chose this book as re-entry because the book itself is designed for it. I have a relatively strong background in Classical and Medieval thought, so this book was a natural outgrowth of those thinkers and their ideas. Scruton's opening chapter History of Philosophy and History of Ideas and his second chapter The Rise of Modern Philosophy did a good job of bridging the gap and dealing with the erroneous notion of progress in philosophy:

"I have said that it is an essential feature of philosophical thought that it should have truth as its aim. But, faced with the bewildering variety of the conclusions, the contradictions of the methods, and the darkness of the premises of the philosophers, the lay reader might well feel that this aim is either unfulfillable, or at best a pious hope rather than a serious intention...then there ought to be philosophical progress...And yet we find no such thing" (p.7)

I will leave it to the reader to see how Professor Scruton answers such a daunting task which he has set out for himself in a "short" book.

[Tim S. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book quite unfriendly to the lay reader, who I have to assume is the targeted audience for a brief history. The discussions seem far too brief to be of any real enlightenment to the learned philosophy student (not me), and certainly too dense and jargon-laced to be easily understood by the general reader (me).

I've read a number of intro to philosophy-style books, so the ideas and philosophers discussed here are not exactly unfamiliar to me. Nevertheless, I could barely follow Scruton's summaries from one paragraph to the next. He's short on vivid examples, high on confusing terms (the predicate to the subject of the concept of the idea, etc), and often seems more concerned with laying out his own judgments than explaining the theories he's outlining. It's disconcerting to muddle your way through one of Scruton's difficult chapters, only to have the author himself dismiss the philosophers in question as confused and hard to understand.

So I can't really imagine the audience for this book. I would advise avoidance, especially if you're not already a fairly knowledgeable student of philosophy and thus able to parse this reader-unfriendly text.

[Bjbernis Bernis · Rating 5 out of 5]

You don't need to spend 8 years in Undergrad (like I did) to understand the basic of Philosophy. This book manages to summarize some of the most difficult material in philosophy without sacrificing too many important details and distinctions. If you haven't taken a course in philosophy, you owe it to yourself and to the world to give this book a read. Philosophy is all about expanding choice; and after reading this book, you'll come to find that many of the beliefs you take for granted might not be the ones you eventually choose.

[anne maeve · Rating 1 out of 5]

Saai

[S.M.Y Kayseri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an essential read to summarize our understanding on modern philosophy from, as the title suggested, Descartes to Wittgenstein. While the author did a splendid job in providing a robust summary to each notable philosophers, I would still recommend potential readers to have at least completed the key works of the authors he elaborated in this volume. I think this volume would function better as a refresher rather than an introduction to modern philosophy for beginners.

Modern philosophy begins with a man named Descartes who proposed that a new method of knowledge should be founded based on indubitable foundation. But what is this foundation? Since then, European philosophy divided into 2 opposing camps. The first camp is the rationalists, who believed that man can gain knowledge from a priori truths, which completely independent from experiences. 1 + 1 = 2 is valid even though there’s no human exists to cognise this. On the other hand, the empiricists believed that the source of all knowledge is based from experience; man are born as a clean slate which is then slowly filled with colours from everyday life. According to them, 1 + 1 is 2 because we observed this from counting things in real world.

But truth does not lies in the attainment of an endpoint, but a resolution of contradiction. The greatest philosopher since Aristotle, Kant argued that we actually need both the concepts (understanding) and the sensual data (sensibility) in order to gain the cognition of something. We need both the concepts of fruit, redness, solidity and the sensual data to gain the perception of a fruit. Concepts without sensibility is empty, while sensibility without concepts are blind. By proving that both of our conceptual and empirical faculties each other limits the possible scope of objects of experience, Kant has locked the heaven forever for us. But even he noticed that despite his robust analysis, we have an innate tendency to generate thoughts and belief that escaped the limits of understanding, this include the ideas of God, beauty, love and ethics. Despite being bounded by the laws of nature, we possessed an “I” that is free, exactly because this I does not sit in the world, but above it, just as our lover does not lie behind the flesh, but above it. From the very fact that we ourselves is a free subject transcending the laws of nature, we seemed to have the capability to generate extra-experience thoughts.

This contradiction, according to Hegel, were only contradictions from the limited conception of understanding as Kant conceived it. When I am in the train, I simultaneously felt that the station is slipping backwards and that the station is static, it is only me that is moving forward. This illusion is something to be transcended, to be viewed from the totality of the whole rather from the egocentric of the parts. Post-Hegel, more authors were expanding on the transcendental subject, starting from Kierkegaard until the linguistic mass created by Sartre. For an instance, what Sartre really means when he said that “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being- like a worm”? While it does possessed a poetic ring, but it provide something that could never be proven and analysed. The mess created by these authors gave rise to the analytic movement, which insisted philosophy to return to Earth and abandon pompous elevated metaphysics.

Wittgenstein declared that, “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our language by means of language”, which is shown in the works of the likes of Sartre. He insisted that we must return to atomic facts that could be assembled into atomic propositions, which its truth-value could be assessed in each of its part and in its totality. Anything beyond this is, according to him, is nonsense. His work, Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus aimed to do this. But while declaring that this work has solved all problems of philosophy, doesn’t this work itself is not formed from the atomic facts and proposition he insisted upon at the very beginning, and thus nonsensical? This he admitted to it, saying that one must throw the ladder away after he has climbed up to it. After transcending the limits of language, one must return to the public domain of knowledge, and suffice oneself with the axiom: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

[Imran Kazi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scruton is clear ( as clear as he could be, when he is dealing with the likes of Hegel, Fichte and the lot), concise and confident on his exposition of nearly all the great modern philosophers. One of the best book to get an idea about how philosophy evolved from the days of Descartes.

[Lukas op de Beke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short history is, first of all, indeed very short and succinct but certainly not cursory. It is nicely divided in metaphysics & epistemology, and the rest of the philosophical sub-fields. Of course not every section was equally interesting to me, for the simple reason that reading Spinoza and Leibniz banter about the nature of substance, monads and universals does not ring any bell with me.

Nevertheless I found the introduction very appealing, Scruton's "meta"-philosophy is very to the point- he touches on questions such as "is there every progress in philosophy?"- and quite rightly puts the concern or even quest for truth at the center, a thing which is all-too-easily forgotten by some philosophers. Furthermore, the sections on Descartes (the section on the British empiricists was a bit tedious), Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Kant, who gets the amount of coverage the greatest philosopher of modernity deserves, were impeccable.

There's also a smart advisory section on which books to read per philosopher to gain a better understanding of their views, in fact, I think I should read more on Descartes.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Semantics and god got you girls back in the day..

[Joseph Bouchoc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read a number of the history of philosophy type of works over the years that have contributed overall to a general sense of the way philosophy has progressed. I would like a better grasp but I’m unsure that’ll ever come without more focused writing or study. It’s hard to compare this one to the others, although I appreciated beginning with Descartes and the focus on the modern progression of thought. Also I seemed to get a better understanding of Kant than I previously had, especially how he fits in with rationalism and empiricism.

After finishing this book I was left with the picture that philosophy has slowly devolved since Descartes. It reminded me of Lloyd Gerson’s book “Platonism and Naturalism” and the benefit of reviving the older ways of thinking. Gerson’s book was annoyingly dense but he showed that Christianity rests on a philosophical foundation that is anti-materialist, anti-nominalist, anti-mechanist, anti-skepticist, and anti-relativist. Modern philosophy since Descartes has eroded one or all of these, but there still exists a philosophical tradition - going all the way back to Plato, that maintains this and on which Christianity depends.

[Rico · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear description of modern philosophy's origins and development. Probably best of all, Sir Roger Scruton made me want to go back to those philosophers with a new appreciation of what they were trying to do (even if the projects were flawed to begin with or I don't accept their premises). I wish I had read this book when I was an undergrad.

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very helpful.
3.5 stars

[Sandra]

A joy to read if you are at least somewhat familiar with the subject matter.

[Conor Primett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Roger Scruton’s A Short History of Modern Philosophy presents itself as a gateway text, a concise map through the major figures of modern philosophy. At first glance, it promises much: a single volume in which the lay reader might be introduced to the sweep of thought from Descartes to the twentieth century, and in which the student might find a helpful guide to the terrain of arguments that define the modern canon. It is therefore disappointing, though perhaps not surprising, that the book fails so completely in the very task it sets itself. What emerges is not a guide, nor even a lively précis, but a skeletal, unfriendly compilation, one that seems unable to decide who it is for, and which ultimately reduces philosophy to something inert.

The two-star rating I attach to this book is not a reflection of Scruton’s lack of intelligence. On the contrary, Scruton was undoubtedly a capable philosopher, erudite, and in his other writings capable of flashes of style and wit. The problem here is not intellectual incompetence but an approach to philosophy that mistakes concision for clarity and summary for illumination. The result is not so much a history of modern philosophy as a set of dutiful notes, embalmed in dry prose, which serve no one very well. For the beginner, the text is hostile: too dense, too full of jargon, with no sense of how to build understanding. For the expert, it is useless: too brief, too cursory, too schematic to serve as revision or refresher. One closes the book asking not only why it was written, but for whom.

Adorno’s critique of Halbbildung, half-education, resonates here. Adorno warned against the tendency in modern culture to transform education into the mere acquisition of cultural goods, the accumulation of snippets of knowledge that can be displayed but never deeply assimilated. Half-education, in his view, was not ignorance but something worse: the shell of knowledge without its content, the appearance of learning without its transformative power. Scruton’s book is precisely such an object. It provides the appearance of intellectual authority, the form of cultural education — after all, here are the names, here are the doctrines, here is a sequence from Descartes to Sartre — but it denies the reader access to the living substance of philosophy. It allows one to say “I have read about Kant” without ever really encountering Kant’s urgency. It allows one to appear conversant with Hegel without ever feeling the vertiginous movement of the dialectic. In short, it is half-education in its purest form: education reduced to dead summary.

The problem is compounded by the genre itself. A “short history” of philosophy is, by definition, fraught with difficulty. Philosophy does not lend itself easily to compression because it is not simply a collection of doctrines. It is a tradition of arguments, living dialogues, disputes carried across generations. To summarise Descartes is not to explain him; one must also explain the scepticism of Montaigne and the scholasticism he sought to overturn. To summarise Kant is not to outline the categories of the Critique, but to dramatise his attempt to reconcile Newton with morality, Hume with freedom, scepticism with faith. To write a history of philosophy is to narrate a story of problems, not simply to list solutions. Scruton, in compressing, strips away this narrative, leaving statues where there should be combatants.

It is useful to compare this with Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. Russell is hardly without flaws. His book is tendentious, riddled with biases, sometimes unfair to those he dislikes (his caricature of Hegel is notorious), and his breezy wit can flatten nuance. Yet Russell’s text lives. He writes with energy, with humour, with the sense that philosophy matters, that it was written by people wrestling with real problems in their own times. Russell provokes the reader to argue back, to disagree, but in doing so he opens the reader into dialogue. Even when he is wrong, he stimulates. Scruton, by contrast, provokes no dialogue. His summaries are neutral, precise, correct — but lifeless. They inspire not thought but fatigue. Reading him, one does not feel the urgency of the question, only the tedium of a catalogue.

Copleston’s History of Philosophy, by contrast, represents another model: expansive, cautious, and comprehensive. Copleston, writing as a Jesuit philosopher, avoids Russell’s wit and polemic but gives the reader context, detail, and careful exposition. His history is long, perhaps daunting, but it rewards attention: it is written in a style that assumes seriousness, and it provides enough detail that the reader can actually grasp why a particular thinker mattered. Compared to Copleston, Scruton’s brevity is exposed as emptiness. To be brief is not necessarily to be bad — but brevity must come with synthesis, with the art of making small statements carry large truths. Scruton’s statements remain small, thin, without weight.

One might argue that Scruton’s background as a conservative philosopher colours his presentation. He is, in his other works, often sharp, polemical, and politically pointed. In this book, however, he seems to suppress that voice, producing something that feels as though it were written under duress. Where his polemical writings are enlivened by his personality — even if one disagrees with him — here the personality is absent. The prose is bureaucratic, anaemic, reluctant. It reads like an obligation, not like a book that anyone truly wanted to write.

The effect of this becomes clearest when one looks at his treatment of the major figures. His Kant, as I have already noted, is skeletal. His Hegel is stripped of fire, reduced to formulae. His Nietzsche is robbed of voice: one would scarcely know, from Scruton’s summary, that Nietzsche wrote like a prophet, a poet of destruction. To render Nietzsche dull is an achievement of sorts, but not one to be proud of. Even his treatment of Descartes, normally the simplest of starting points, feels perfunctory, as though he were eager to get the obligation out of the way. At no point does the book convince the reader that philosophy is urgent, that these thinkers matter. At no point does it animate the tradition as dialogue.

What is lost, then, is not only clarity but the very sense of philosophy as living thought. This is why I call it half-education: it provides information without transformation. To read philosophy is not simply to acquire facts but to be unsettled, to be forced into new perspectives, to be drawn into argument. Scruton’s book denies that possibility. It gives us the shells of arguments but not their animating tensions. It presents philosophy as dead text, as though one could learn Descartes by reading a few pages of summary rather than by feeling the anxiety of his Meditations.

The book also suffers from an indifference to style. This is perhaps the greatest irony, because Scruton was, in other contexts, a fine stylist. His essays on aesthetics, his polemical interventions, his defences of conservative culture — whatever one makes of their politics — were often written with sharpness and wit. Here, however, all is flat. The prose trudges, colourless, dry. There is no sparkle, no sense of delight in language, no effort to seduce the reader into caring. Philosophy, even at its most difficult, should exhilarate. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard understood this. Even Kant, with his labyrinthine prose, compels by the sheer seriousness of his endeavour. Scruton’s summaries compel no one.

The failure, then, is not simply personal but symptomatic. This is what happens when philosophy is treated as cultural commodity, when the imperative is to produce a digestible guide rather than to provoke thought. Adorno warned against this: when culture is reduced to summaries, to lists, to capsules, it ceases to be culture at all. It becomes reified, dead. A Short History of Modern Philosophy is an instance of that process. It provides the appearance of education — one can say one has read about Spinoza or Leibniz — but in truth it provides nothing. It allows one to consume the name without engaging with the substance. It is education hollowed out.

Perhaps the book might serve some narrow use as a reference, a quick way of jogging one’s memory about the outlines of a doctrine. But even here it is inadequate. The brevity of the summaries is such that they rarely rise above the level of index entries. They are not inaccurate, but they are bloodless. To consult Copleston or Magee is to encounter philosophers in context, in argument. To consult Scruton is to encounter lists.

And so the rating of two stars feels not only fair but generous. The book is not wrong, but it is useless. It has information but no life, precision but no illumination. It fails both as introduction and as reference, and in doing so exemplifies what philosophy is not. Philosophy is not the accumulation of names and doctrines, but the living tension of arguments. It is not the dry catalogue of what was thought, but the dramatic enactment of thinking itself. Scruton’s book betrays that truth.

In the end, what is most dispiriting is not that the book is bad, but that it represents a wider cultural tendency: the flattening of education into half-education, the transformation of philosophy into a commodity to be consumed without effort. Against this, one must insist: philosophy is difficult, yes, but its difficulty is the path to freedom. To reduce it to summaries is to rob it of that power. Better to wrestle with the primary texts themselves, better to endure the long, sprawling histories of Copleston, or even the polemical wit of Russell, than to suffer the anaemia of Scruton’s brevity.

Two stars, then, and a warning. This is not the way to learn philosophy, nor the way to write about it. The book is a symptom, not a cure; an example of the very half-education Adorno warned us against. It has the form of education but not its substance, the appearance of knowledge without its life. Philosophy deserves more.

[Ahmed Obaid · Rating 5 out of 5]

ما أثار انتباهي في هذا الكتاب، على الرغم من أنه واحد بين العديد من كتب تاريخ الفلسفة، هو أنه من وجهة نظر جديدة، لم أجد حديثًا عنها بالعربية، ألا وهي الفلسفة التحليلية، فالكاتب - وهو يصرّح في المقدمة - أنه كُتِب من وجهة نظر الفلسفة التحليلية، فالفلاسفة الذين اختارهم أيضًا هم ذو أهمية في التراث الفلسفي التحليلي، مثل فريجه، الذي لا أجده عادة في كتب تاريخ الفلسفة التي لا تتبنى النظرة التحليلية. ولكني لا أرى أي اختلاف جوهري بين هذا الكتاب والكتب التي لا تتبنى النظرة التحليلية في العرض لتاريخ الفلسفة، هو قال أن ما يميز هذه النظرة هو اهتمامها بالأفكار وليس بالأشخاص، وهذا ما لا أعرف مدى أهميته حقيقة، فكل مهتم بالفلسفة بالطبع يهتم بأفكارها! ولكن عليّ قراءة المزيد عن هذا النوع من الفلسفة - الفلسفة التحليلية - لأرى الفرق حقيقة.

أجد أيضًا أن لغة الكتاب واضحة، وطريقة عرضه للأفكار ممتعة ولهذا أعطيته خمس نجوم.

[Gonçalo Gato · Rating 3 out of 5]

Começo por deixar claro que a presente opinião provem de um leitor cujas bases filosóficas se cingem ao conteúdo abordado durante o secundário. Por essa razão, achei esta obra maioritariamente entediante, com breves e pontuais episódios de lucidez onde tive a felicidade de discernir novas ideias. Apesar de, no geral, achar esta leitura enriquecedora, não a considero uma leitura eficaz para leitores como eu, que não lêem um livro de filosofia há mais de 6 anos.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid summary of Modern European Philosophy. I read this as a follow up to a 17th and 18th European philosophy course that I took in Spring 2023. At times, Scruton uses unnecessary vocabulary which makes it a bit less newbie friendly. I liked the choice of topics and his writing style, generally, but I think it could have been a bit more accessible as an introductory text.

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of a wide range of modern philosophers. It helps that Scruton is knowledgeable, clear thinking and has a clear and confident writing style. This sort of book needs clarity, not tentative views. Scruton has his biases, but they are so well known and therefore apparent and mostly harmless. By presenting this as a history Scruton is able to contrast and compare a range of philosophers and explain the development of (European) philosophy.

In detail, I particularly liked the parts on Kant, Frege and Wittgenstein. These give a taste of very complex thinking in a relatively straightforward and understandable way (though take the word "relatively" in this sentence seriously!). I was less enamoured of the parts covering Hegel and Phenomenology, as they were less insightful for me, but then perhaps this may be because they are quite impenetrable without lots more work. Sections on the British Empiricists were good - although if this is your interest Priests "The British Empiricists" is better.

A word of caution though - this is not a book for the complete philosophy novice, even if it is called an introduction. It does assume a certain level of familiarity with some, albeit basic, philosophical terminology and concepts.

[Falk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scruton here provides a “synthetic vision of the history of modern philosophy, from an analytical perspective”.. – For me, the book didn’t really take off until Scruton moved on to Leibniz, and then Locke. With these philosophers, the writing got a lot more interesting, and from there on it only got better. I thought he gave an excellent summary of Spinoza’s philosophy however. I also very much appreciated his chapters on both Kant and Hegel, which I thought were lucidly written. His chapters on political philosophy are well integrated with the rest of the book. (Again) I especially liked Scruton's take on Hegel, but also Hobbes, Locke and then Marx, as well as the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, are all duly covered here. His final chapters on recent philosophy (from Frege to Wittgenstein), though necessarily a bit brief, provides a great summary. Overall I’m impressed not only about how much information he is able to convey in a minimum of pages, but also with the way he manages to tie it all together.

[Linda Vituma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man ir tādi brīži dzīvē, kad klausos filozofijas grāmatas un tās mani mierina, gluži kā džezs. Mierina pat tad, kad tās nesaprotu. Mierina pat tad, kad tā īsti apzināti pat neklausos. Audiogrāmatas man ir kā mazam puikam Khan academy vīriņš - labāks par dzīvu cilvēku, jo var apturēt un drillēt un drillēt atkal un atkal, kamēr dzirdētais pielec, ar savu neapķērību neapgrūtinot citus.
Skrutons filozofijā man ir kā Ivars Mazurs džezā - vakara pasaka, kas nomierina un atslābina, lai kas arī dienā būtu piedzīvots.

[Almachius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does what it says on the tin, but it's a tin made by Scruton, so, even when you only vaguely understand every thirty-seventh sentence, you still feel brighter - in every sense of the word - whilst reading it. As always: a delicious tonic for a mad, humourless world.

As we approach his first anniversary, I wonder what he would have said of 2020? Whatever it would be, it would no doubt have brought laughter to our lips and wisdom to our minds. Rest in peace, Sir Roger.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got more from this than I did from my semester-long course on Early Modern Philosophy.

[Markus · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yet another surface level dead boring take on what philosophy is. I guess I was hoping something original from Scruton since he is a republican intellectual yet I am disappointed a second time. Maybe I am being too unfair as this book is supposed to be a mere recounting of the history of philosophy, then again, surely, one can bring more meaning into an important topic like this.

The way Scruton presents this modern history is a series of disjointed encyclopedic meaningless ideas that don't make much sense. He also uses big academic words rather to conceal his lack of real grasp of what he's writing about and not because it's really necessary. He also thinks Wittgenstein is the best, definitely the best philosophy man. I don't remember why, I was dying of boredom by then.

The only real piece of meaningfulness and narrative I got from the book was about the development of rationalism (Descartes) to empiricism represented by the British empiricists such as Locke and Hume. While Scruton did not ponder about it at all, this clash gives much food for thought about the duality of today's politics and offers a way to better understand modern times.

It goes something like this. The rationalists who are represented by the left believe that the ability of man to reason is the core idea societies should be built around. Descartes was a mathematician and when he came out with his ideas, it was widely believed that reality was largely "solved" by just applying reason and logic to it and deducting every aspect of the world from reason alone. It was supposed to be a new scientific key to the world.

Then the empiricist crashed the party. Most important of them probably being John Locke. He said you cannot merely derive everything from reason alone by deduction, instead we actually need to rely on empirical evidence and to induct our understanding of reality from it, if we want to do it correctly.

Thus we arrive at today's world of rationalists on the left and empiricists on the right side of politics. One side relies on the supposed inherent ability of man to reason and attempts to shape the world around this conviction. The other side relies more on the empirical experience of what has worked so far (traditions) and what is happening in the real world and shapes their theories accordingly. In addition the left has definitely managed to portray themselves as the more intellectual side, I'm not sure how they managed that.

Another important narrative that Scruton didn't write about was how Hegel was the father of ideologies that lead to the massive hellish wave of collectivist murderous states in the 20th century. The seed of this was planted by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, where he starts to deny the validity of reason itself and invents a noumenal realm, where the real essence of reality lies.

This willingness to deny reality in favor of an alternate dimension of sorts arguably gives the ground to deny the validity of individuals in favor of collective ideas such as the state or some other such term that has been used in the murderous collectivist rampages of states in the 20th century.

It is likely that whenever philosophers base their metaphysics on an imaginary alternate dimension, the practical application of these philosophies in a society will lead to a hell on earth. This was perfectly well demonstrated by Plato who denied the validity of physical reality and believed instead in an alternate dimension called Platonic realm. In his Republic and lesser known Laws he portrays his ideal society which is a collectivist hell of moral depravement, suffering and state control of every aspect of people's lives.

I'm sure there are more examples of this among philosophers and maybe this theory could be proven but I'm not a philosopher and am not yet inclined to do the work to try to prove it. Roger Scruton definitely hasn't done the work.

[NDH · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually read this over a year ago and wrote no review. I’m re-reading various chapters to reinforce my understanding of Kant and Spinoza (and their influence and influences). Roger Scruton sometimes re-uses material from his “Very Short” Introductions on Kant and Spinoza, but it’s still useful to read about these “thinkers” under slightly different lights, and repetition is sometimes the heart of understanding.
I think. Therefore I read. And re-read.
*****
Having done some of that selective re-reading, I want to comment on RS’s introductory chapter, “The Rise of Modern Philosophy.” Basically, I don’t think it’s very well-written. There are too many times when he throws in extraneous commentary that contributes nothing. For example, “Using as their basic text a passage from Porphyry’s ‘Isagoge’, transmitted and commented upon by Boethius, philosophers enquired …” (p. 18). What value does that information add to the story he’s supposed to be telling? Why should I care? None, and I don’t, and he never makes me want to care about ‘Isagoge.’ There’s a lot of that type of superfluous loquacity in this introduction, and a valuable re-write would be to excise all of it.

Another criticism I have would be of RS’s neglecting to explain new concepts as he introduces them. The earliest example of this is on p.13 in the very first paragraph where he says, “The method of philosophy changed radically…” What, exactly, was that Method and what, exactly, was the change? I immediately want to know what to look for so that I will be sure to see it when I encounter it later.
Another example: “Later versions” (of the ontological argument) … rely on the idea that existence is a perfection and therefore a property of whatever possesses it.” What the heck is a “perfection?” What is not a “perfection?” What’s the value of that sentence? It has none!

I also think the intro abounds in (other) missed opportunities. For example, on p21 RS says, “…the (ontological) argument … (was) accepted by all three of the major rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century.” Why not name them and foreshadow the structure of the book we are about to read? Similar foreshadowing would be very useful regarding the structure of the rest of the book and of the characters we are going to be meeting. (And is not the ontological argument a form of analytic a priori knowledge? It wouldn’t hurt to point that out, if it’s true, or at least footnote why it’s not, if it’s not.)

On the topic of footnotes, there are abundant opportunities for using same both for clarity and to dispense with some of the superfluous digressions.

I also want to suggest that the entire section on The Rejection of Scholasticism is very badly written. RS has never told us about “the lacunae in the systems which (the schools) propagated,” nor about the “medieval theories of education” which John of Salisbury ( who??) threw into doubt. I have this feeling that RS’ editor was too intimidated of RS’ obvious towering intellect to tell him that the section, the whole intro really, needed to be re-written.

I, of course, would be happy to to do re-write. My thinking and writing are relatively unencumbered by excessive knowledge. :)

[Daniel Solomon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall this book is a good summary of traditional Rationalist and Empiricist thinkers culminating in Kant. It seemed to provide a decent explanation/revision of the key ideas of people like Descartes or Hume or Kant.

Scruton provides a classic interpretation of Kant as providing the grand enlightenment synthesis between rationalism and empiricism, though highlighting alternative interpretations that sustained the German Idealism that's much criticised by most Analytic philosophy. I also got a lot more understanding of Hegel and his philosophy's link to Marxism and Existentialism via concepts such as alienation. The discussion of analytic philosophy via Frege and Wittgenstein was good overall. However, closing the book on modern philosophy with Wittgenstein is premature. I think there should have been a more general section on modern analytic philosophy, bringing together Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein with more mature Vienna circle/Ayer logic-empiricism and the pragmatism post-logic-empiricism of Quine and reactions to him. Closing the book with early Analytic philosophy of Wittgenstein/Frege/Russell provides a misleading picture of the status of the debate on things like the analytic/synthetic distinction and the link to neccessity and a priori, as well as modern thinking about meaning and reference of names and propositions.

I think the sections on utilitarianism and marxism were incomplete and gave a partial perspective, as did the short section on Nietzsche. The discussion of phenomenology and existentialism had good parts, but confusing in parts, possibly simply because (as the author highlights) the writings of Heidegger at least are highly obscure and confusing and open to multiple interpretations.

Regarding style: the book is advertised a book understandable to the educated layperson, but Scruton often uses without proper explanation philosophical or logical vocabulary as if he's writing a summary/revision text for people who already know significant philosophy or logic. I occassionally had to check the meaning of several key terms from a humbler source such as Wikipedia.

Overall this was a good book for revising the classic philosophies of the early modern/enlightenmenet eras, with some decent analysis of Frege and Wittgenestein. I was less convinced by the sections on political economy/Marxism and existentialism. But well worth
reading for gaining a more solid amateur understanding of modern philosophy.