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New History of Western Philosophy #4
Philosophy in the Modern World
Here is the concluding volume of Sir Anthony Kenny's monumental four-volume history of philosophy, the first major single-author narrative history to appear for several decades.
In this volume, Kenny tells the fascinating story of the development of philosophy in the modern world, from the early nineteenth century to the end of the millennium. Alongside (and intertwined with) extraordinary scientific advances, cultural changes, and political upheavals, the last two
centuries have seen some of the most intriguing and original developments in philosophical thinking, which have transformed our understanding of ourselves and our world. In the first part of the book, Kenny offers a lively narrative introducing the major thinkers in their historical context. Among
those we meet are the great figures of continental European philosophy, from Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida; the Pragmatists such as C.S. Pierce and William James, who first developed a distinctively American philosophical tradition; Marx, Darwin, and
Freud, the non-philosophers whose influence on philosophy was immense; and Wittgenstein and Russell, friends and colleagues who set the agenda for analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. Kenny then proceeds to guide the reader lucidly through the nine main areas of philosophical work in the
period, offering a serious engagement with ideas and arguments about logic, language, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics, and the existence of God.
Graced with many beautiful illustrations, Philosophy in the Modern World concludes Kenny's stimulating history of the intellectual development of Western civilization, allowing readers to trace the birth and growth of philosophy from antiquity to the present day.
In this volume, Kenny tells the fascinating story of the development of philosophy in the modern world, from the early nineteenth century to the end of the millennium. Alongside (and intertwined with) extraordinary scientific advances, cultural changes, and political upheavals, the last two
centuries have seen some of the most intriguing and original developments in philosophical thinking, which have transformed our understanding of ourselves and our world. In the first part of the book, Kenny offers a lively narrative introducing the major thinkers in their historical context. Among
those we meet are the great figures of continental European philosophy, from Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida; the Pragmatists such as C.S. Pierce and William James, who first developed a distinctively American philosophical tradition; Marx, Darwin, and
Freud, the non-philosophers whose influence on philosophy was immense; and Wittgenstein and Russell, friends and colleagues who set the agenda for analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. Kenny then proceeds to guide the reader lucidly through the nine main areas of philosophical work in the
period, offering a serious engagement with ideas and arguments about logic, language, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics, and the existence of God.
Graced with many beautiful illustrations, Philosophy in the Modern World concludes Kenny's stimulating history of the intellectual development of Western civilization, allowing readers to trace the birth and growth of philosophy from antiquity to the present day.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
47 people are currently reading
613 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Kenny
177 books115 followersSir Anthony Kenny is an English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 17, 2020
My favorite volume is, for sure, that of Medieval Philosophy. Reading volume 2 made me reconsider everything I have previously known about the medieval ages. These people are extremely smart, sophisticated, have high-tastes, and are excellent logicians and metaphysicians.
Volume 4, that concerning contemporary philosophy, is perhaps my least favorite. I would have given it 4.75 stars, but I would more than happily round that to a 5.
This volume is beyond amazing; In it, Anthony Kenny perfectly presents Frege, Russel, Wittgenstein, James, Newman, Freud, Darwin, Peirce, Husserl, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Quine.
*But sadly, he could have talked more about Emerson in Language, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and God. Emerson in my opinion, has had the most profound influence on a lot of American philosophers, and he was the single-most important influence to the separation of Analytic and Continental Philosophy from that of the Transatlantic.
*He could have also added a chapter on Economic thought, since Economics turned from Philosophy to a science in this time; and there's no shortage of economic philosophers in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century. He could have also added them in his chapters on Ethics, Political Philosophy, and Epistemology.
*In my opinion, Marx was better represented in chapter 3 than chapter 11. And there is really no justice in putting Marx without putting those who proceeded and superseded him in Economic and Political thought.
*It seems important to me to put literature in a separate chapter, and including the New Critical School, the Structuralists, and deconstruction.
With all that aside, even though this volume seems Wittgenstein-centric, it is beyond useful and wonderful and deserving of everyone's attention insofar as he is interested in philosophy. I would generally not be so inclined to tell an author of such an important book what he has neglected or what ought to be placed and where and what should be changed. But this book is a bible, and bibles can't survive the tinkering marginalia of the pencil.
Volume 4, that concerning contemporary philosophy, is perhaps my least favorite. I would have given it 4.75 stars, but I would more than happily round that to a 5.
This volume is beyond amazing; In it, Anthony Kenny perfectly presents Frege, Russel, Wittgenstein, James, Newman, Freud, Darwin, Peirce, Husserl, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Quine.
*But sadly, he could have talked more about Emerson in Language, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and God. Emerson in my opinion, has had the most profound influence on a lot of American philosophers, and he was the single-most important influence to the separation of Analytic and Continental Philosophy from that of the Transatlantic.
*He could have also added a chapter on Economic thought, since Economics turned from Philosophy to a science in this time; and there's no shortage of economic philosophers in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century. He could have also added them in his chapters on Ethics, Political Philosophy, and Epistemology.
*In my opinion, Marx was better represented in chapter 3 than chapter 11. And there is really no justice in putting Marx without putting those who proceeded and superseded him in Economic and Political thought.
*It seems important to me to put literature in a separate chapter, and including the New Critical School, the Structuralists, and deconstruction.
With all that aside, even though this volume seems Wittgenstein-centric, it is beyond useful and wonderful and deserving of everyone's attention insofar as he is interested in philosophy. I would generally not be so inclined to tell an author of such an important book what he has neglected or what ought to be placed and where and what should be changed. But this book is a bible, and bibles can't survive the tinkering marginalia of the pencil.
March 17, 2022
(Jim Cook’s review). This is the 4th and final volume in Kenny’s 4-volume history of western philosophy. This volume has the same structure as the other three, that is to say, it begins with several chapters that provide an overview of the lives and central ideas of the key philosophers of the period (in this instance, from the middle of the 19th century up to the publication of John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice in 1971) followed by thematic chapters.
Like the others in this series, volume 4 has plenty of interesting illustrations. My two favourites are a photo of the philosophical “power couple” of Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, both of whom look to be in desperate need of a makeover; and, a photo of a fine receipt issued in 1974 in the old USSR for “belief in God.”
The books’ cover illustration is a print from As Is When, a series of 12 screenprints based on the life and writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the philosophers discussed in volume 4. Unlike the other volumes in this series, it has a dedication to someone, in this instance to a philosophical colleague of his.
The books’ first chapter briefly describes the works of philosophers from Bentham to Nietzsche, including JS Mill, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman, and Darwin. Kenny also discusses what he calls “Dialetical Materialism” in the first chapter. Kenny’s brief accounts of each philosopher are necessarily abbreviated but he does have some interesting things to say about Mill, based on that philosopher’s first publication, his six-volume System of Logic. Kenny’s account of Schopenhauer reinforced my dislike of this thinker whose thought is both nonsensical and ultra chauvinistic. In my view, Kenny’s comments on Bentham and Sidgwick are somewhat uncharitable.
But those comments are nothing compared to the stereotyping he engages in when discussing Marx. Unlike the other philosophers in the chapter, the section about Marx isn’t even graced with that philosopher’s proper name; instead the heading is “Dialectical Materialism.” Like many a hostile commentator on him the citations used to discredit Marx are actually things written by Engels after Marx’s death. Moreover, the term used to describe their philosophical approach, dialectical materialism, was actually never used by either Marx or Engels. It’s a term that was popularized by the Russian marxist Georgi Plekanov in the 1890’s.
Given Kenny’s starting point it’s not surprising that he says things like the following: “Marx erred in claiming that events are determined totally by economic factors” (p. 23). Of course, Marx never held such an “economistic” view. Kenny even stoops so low as to imply that, as Marx was a poor provider, three of his children “died of starvation”! Again, there is no evidence that the tragic deaths of some of Marx’s children were due to “starvation.” This lack of empathy by Kenny is in contrast to the sympathetic comments elsewhere his book about the tragic early life of Kierkegaard, who lost his Mom and five of his 6 siblings by the time he reached adulthood.
It’s hard to believe that a philosopher of Kenny’s stature would promote uncharitable and erroneous ideas about Marx’s work. His comments about Marx towards the end of the book only partially redeem Kenny. There Kenny remarks that Marx’s theory of surplus value “is thought-provoking and contains profound philosophical insights” and he admits that “the improvement in the condition of the working classes would not have taken place without the heightened awareness of the wretched state of factory labourers to which the work of Marx and Engels made a significant contribution” (p. 285).
Kenny next looks at the philosophers who represent the pragmatist school of thought up to those who developed what became know as logical positivism and analytical philosophy. He also throws in comments about the British Idealists for good measure. This is, of course, a massive amount of philosophical territory to cover in less than 40 pages!But overall he does a good job of summarizing their work and I thought his account of Gottlob Frege’s contributions to analytical philosophy and his lucid overview of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus were excellent.
The third chaapter covers thinkers such as Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida. I completely agree with Kenny’s assessment of Freud: “No philosopher since Aristotle has made a greater contribution to the everyday vocabulary of psychology and morality” (p. 78). Sadly, Kenny does not give adequate space, in my view, to the phenomenological tradition of Continental philosophy and so his remarks on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre are cursory and unsatisfying. His discussion of the work of the French philosopher, Derrida, however, was much more to my liking. While Kenny does make an effort to try to explain Derrida’s unique approach, much of Kenny’s analysis is toungue-in-cheek. His concluding remark about Derrida is worth quoting in full. Derrida, says Kenny, “has been taken by many people to be a serious philosopher, and he should be evaluated as such. But it is unsurprising that his fame has been less in philosophy departments than in departments of literature, whose members have had less practice in discerning genuine from counterfeit philosophy” (p. 98). In other words, Kenny politely calls Derrida a fake!
Kenny’s book then explores the following thematic topics: logic, language, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy and God. A few of the highlights, for me, were Kenny’s very lucid comments about the arguments made by Wittgenstein (which both Kenny and I accept) against the possibility of a private language; his summary of the development, in the 20th century, of philosophical thinking about epistemology where one can see (Kenny suggests) a convergence of the two main philosophical schools of modernity, the Analytic and the Phenomenological; and, his interesting arguments regarding the problems created by using utilitarian ideas as a guide to making moral choices. (I would tend to argue that a well-constructed form of rule-utilitarianism can probably successfully address the problems that Kenny enumerates).
I am also a little disappointed in his chapter on political philosophy. It’s difficult for me to understand why he would spill much more ink on the work of Karl Popper than that of John Rawls, who is the foremost political philosopher of the 20th century. I was also surprised by the almost sophomoric account that is given about Rawls, almost as if Kenny had never studied his work at all. Perhaps that is one reason why Kenny mistakenly lists Rawls a writer in the Analytic tradition in his bibliography!
In conclusion, while I think the last two volumes in this series are a little weaker than the first two, Kenny’s History is worth the time and effort it takes to read it. It belongs on any philosophy student’s bookshelf, along with the best one-volume such history ever written - Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, published in 1945.
Like the others in this series, volume 4 has plenty of interesting illustrations. My two favourites are a photo of the philosophical “power couple” of Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, both of whom look to be in desperate need of a makeover; and, a photo of a fine receipt issued in 1974 in the old USSR for “belief in God.”
The books’ cover illustration is a print from As Is When, a series of 12 screenprints based on the life and writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the philosophers discussed in volume 4. Unlike the other volumes in this series, it has a dedication to someone, in this instance to a philosophical colleague of his.
The books’ first chapter briefly describes the works of philosophers from Bentham to Nietzsche, including JS Mill, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman, and Darwin. Kenny also discusses what he calls “Dialetical Materialism” in the first chapter. Kenny’s brief accounts of each philosopher are necessarily abbreviated but he does have some interesting things to say about Mill, based on that philosopher’s first publication, his six-volume System of Logic. Kenny’s account of Schopenhauer reinforced my dislike of this thinker whose thought is both nonsensical and ultra chauvinistic. In my view, Kenny’s comments on Bentham and Sidgwick are somewhat uncharitable.
But those comments are nothing compared to the stereotyping he engages in when discussing Marx. Unlike the other philosophers in the chapter, the section about Marx isn’t even graced with that philosopher’s proper name; instead the heading is “Dialectical Materialism.” Like many a hostile commentator on him the citations used to discredit Marx are actually things written by Engels after Marx’s death. Moreover, the term used to describe their philosophical approach, dialectical materialism, was actually never used by either Marx or Engels. It’s a term that was popularized by the Russian marxist Georgi Plekanov in the 1890’s.
Given Kenny’s starting point it’s not surprising that he says things like the following: “Marx erred in claiming that events are determined totally by economic factors” (p. 23). Of course, Marx never held such an “economistic” view. Kenny even stoops so low as to imply that, as Marx was a poor provider, three of his children “died of starvation”! Again, there is no evidence that the tragic deaths of some of Marx’s children were due to “starvation.” This lack of empathy by Kenny is in contrast to the sympathetic comments elsewhere his book about the tragic early life of Kierkegaard, who lost his Mom and five of his 6 siblings by the time he reached adulthood.
It’s hard to believe that a philosopher of Kenny’s stature would promote uncharitable and erroneous ideas about Marx’s work. His comments about Marx towards the end of the book only partially redeem Kenny. There Kenny remarks that Marx’s theory of surplus value “is thought-provoking and contains profound philosophical insights” and he admits that “the improvement in the condition of the working classes would not have taken place without the heightened awareness of the wretched state of factory labourers to which the work of Marx and Engels made a significant contribution” (p. 285).
Kenny next looks at the philosophers who represent the pragmatist school of thought up to those who developed what became know as logical positivism and analytical philosophy. He also throws in comments about the British Idealists for good measure. This is, of course, a massive amount of philosophical territory to cover in less than 40 pages!But overall he does a good job of summarizing their work and I thought his account of Gottlob Frege’s contributions to analytical philosophy and his lucid overview of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus were excellent.
The third chaapter covers thinkers such as Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida. I completely agree with Kenny’s assessment of Freud: “No philosopher since Aristotle has made a greater contribution to the everyday vocabulary of psychology and morality” (p. 78). Sadly, Kenny does not give adequate space, in my view, to the phenomenological tradition of Continental philosophy and so his remarks on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre are cursory and unsatisfying. His discussion of the work of the French philosopher, Derrida, however, was much more to my liking. While Kenny does make an effort to try to explain Derrida’s unique approach, much of Kenny’s analysis is toungue-in-cheek. His concluding remark about Derrida is worth quoting in full. Derrida, says Kenny, “has been taken by many people to be a serious philosopher, and he should be evaluated as such. But it is unsurprising that his fame has been less in philosophy departments than in departments of literature, whose members have had less practice in discerning genuine from counterfeit philosophy” (p. 98). In other words, Kenny politely calls Derrida a fake!
Kenny’s book then explores the following thematic topics: logic, language, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy and God. A few of the highlights, for me, were Kenny’s very lucid comments about the arguments made by Wittgenstein (which both Kenny and I accept) against the possibility of a private language; his summary of the development, in the 20th century, of philosophical thinking about epistemology where one can see (Kenny suggests) a convergence of the two main philosophical schools of modernity, the Analytic and the Phenomenological; and, his interesting arguments regarding the problems created by using utilitarian ideas as a guide to making moral choices. (I would tend to argue that a well-constructed form of rule-utilitarianism can probably successfully address the problems that Kenny enumerates).
I am also a little disappointed in his chapter on political philosophy. It’s difficult for me to understand why he would spill much more ink on the work of Karl Popper than that of John Rawls, who is the foremost political philosopher of the 20th century. I was also surprised by the almost sophomoric account that is given about Rawls, almost as if Kenny had never studied his work at all. Perhaps that is one reason why Kenny mistakenly lists Rawls a writer in the Analytic tradition in his bibliography!
In conclusion, while I think the last two volumes in this series are a little weaker than the first two, Kenny’s History is worth the time and effort it takes to read it. It belongs on any philosophy student’s bookshelf, along with the best one-volume such history ever written - Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, published in 1945.
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August 13, 2013I honestly wouldn't know to begin with a project like this, which seems to make life doubly difficult for itself by electing to treat the continental and analytic schools in conjunction rather than in isolation. I probably wouldn't end with a philosopher I so disdained as much as Anthony Kenny clearly disdains Derrida, though perhaps this is his way of communicating a certain pessimism about the future of philosophy. I recall a (possibly apocryphal) story about Derrida's selection for an honorary degree at the University of Cambridge, only for the proposal to be nixed by its own philosophy department, who were so incensed that Derrida should even be considered a proper philosopher, much less one recognised outside his own circle. It is easier to believe after after read Kenny's account.
His best section is, understandably, on Wittgenstein, a philosopher whom Kenny has focused the bulk of his study. But the chronological half of the book is usually lucid by the standards of the genre, and where this lucidity breaks down I'm inclined to place the blame at the feet of Hegel et al for coming up with the theories in the first place. The thematic chapters (or those that I read) I found harder to follow, and some were predominantly focused on questions I hadn't considered - the chapter on Philosophy of Mind had much to say on intentionality (for me difficult to distinguish from a problem of semantics) and little on the renewed materialism of neuroscience, but possibly those with more philosophical training than I (that is to say, anyone with any philosophical training at all) may agree with Kenny's approach.
His best section is, understandably, on Wittgenstein, a philosopher whom Kenny has focused the bulk of his study. But the chronological half of the book is usually lucid by the standards of the genre, and where this lucidity breaks down I'm inclined to place the blame at the feet of Hegel et al for coming up with the theories in the first place. The thematic chapters (or those that I read) I found harder to follow, and some were predominantly focused on questions I hadn't considered - the chapter on Philosophy of Mind had much to say on intentionality (for me difficult to distinguish from a problem of semantics) and little on the renewed materialism of neuroscience, but possibly those with more philosophical training than I (that is to say, anyone with any philosophical training at all) may agree with Kenny's approach.
August 7, 2019
Arriviamo all'oggi (da una prospettiva un pò anglocentrica)
Ultimo volume del magnum opus di Sir Anthony Kenny: come inevitabile la trattazione si deve frammentare seguendo i molti rivoli della filosofia contemporanea, ma la presentazione dei pensatori è sempre rigorosa e completa.
Certo, in questo libro le preferenze personali (e le idiosincrasie) di Kenny si notano di più: parecchie stilettate a Bertrand Russell, ai filosofi analitici post-wittgensteiniani, a Nietzsche (un pò velocemente considerato come un profeta invasato) e agli esistenzialisti francesi (con finale spernacchio a Derrida).
Comunque, il punto di vista assolutamente britanno-centrico mi è stato utile perchè posso dire (sommessamente) di aver finalmente compreso la grandezza e la rilevanza storica di Ludwig Wittgenstein, qui giustamente riconosciuto come pietra miliare e punto di svolta della filosofia del secolo XX: dalla dimostrazione del non-senso di tutte le proposizioni filosofiche e metafisiche alla negazione della possibilità di un linguaggio privato che demolisce del solipsismo alla base di ogni idealismo e empirismo. Più di tutti, Wittgenstein ci ha incoraggiato a pensare bene e a riconoscere i limiti del nostro pensare e parlare in logica, in metafisica, in estetica. Anche se Kenny a volte sembra tentare di portare Wittgenstein verso le proprie posizioni (specie sul tema della divinità, dove si tenta ancora di riesumare il consumato argomento ontologico dell'esistenza di Dio).
Molto interessante anche scoprire che il lavoro dei logici (su tutti Frege) ha ripreso concetti e studi di pensatori medievali come Duns Scoto o Tommaso.
Ultimo volume del magnum opus di Sir Anthony Kenny: come inevitabile la trattazione si deve frammentare seguendo i molti rivoli della filosofia contemporanea, ma la presentazione dei pensatori è sempre rigorosa e completa.
Certo, in questo libro le preferenze personali (e le idiosincrasie) di Kenny si notano di più: parecchie stilettate a Bertrand Russell, ai filosofi analitici post-wittgensteiniani, a Nietzsche (un pò velocemente considerato come un profeta invasato) e agli esistenzialisti francesi (con finale spernacchio a Derrida).
Comunque, il punto di vista assolutamente britanno-centrico mi è stato utile perchè posso dire (sommessamente) di aver finalmente compreso la grandezza e la rilevanza storica di Ludwig Wittgenstein, qui giustamente riconosciuto come pietra miliare e punto di svolta della filosofia del secolo XX: dalla dimostrazione del non-senso di tutte le proposizioni filosofiche e metafisiche alla negazione della possibilità di un linguaggio privato che demolisce del solipsismo alla base di ogni idealismo e empirismo. Più di tutti, Wittgenstein ci ha incoraggiato a pensare bene e a riconoscere i limiti del nostro pensare e parlare in logica, in metafisica, in estetica. Anche se Kenny a volte sembra tentare di portare Wittgenstein verso le proprie posizioni (specie sul tema della divinità, dove si tenta ancora di riesumare il consumato argomento ontologico dell'esistenza di Dio).
Molto interessante anche scoprire che il lavoro dei logici (su tutti Frege) ha ripreso concetti e studi di pensatori medievali come Duns Scoto o Tommaso.
October 26, 2018
Not a resounding finish to Kenny's series, but nonetheless maintains the valuable rate of compression which I was looking for in reading this history of philosophy. Here, more than in his earlier sections, I think it can be said that Kenny's survey feels incomplete. The major characters discussed in the first three chapters are not by themselves enough to cover the cast of the 20th century, and we see Kenny reaching out in the topical chapters to reference important modern commentators who are otherwise unacknowledged. The author admitted to uncertainty about where to draw the line for inclusion, and I think some of that uncertainty shows.
This final title changes the tense of the discussion from historical to current, but the tone of the book itself makes no such shift. We do not see any real movement in Kenny for the discussion of what is current in philosophy, or how the field operates -- a few footnotes and allusions here and there are all he spares for truly 'modern' philosophy. I can appreciate keeping the focus on what is historical in 'modern' philosophy, but then the title change is a puzzle. Presumably unrelatedly, in this volume I encountered for the first time some arguments from Kenny himself which seemed highly flawed.
This final title changes the tense of the discussion from historical to current, but the tone of the book itself makes no such shift. We do not see any real movement in Kenny for the discussion of what is current in philosophy, or how the field operates -- a few footnotes and allusions here and there are all he spares for truly 'modern' philosophy. I can appreciate keeping the focus on what is historical in 'modern' philosophy, but then the title change is a puzzle. Presumably unrelatedly, in this volume I encountered for the first time some arguments from Kenny himself which seemed highly flawed.
October 29, 2020
Nesse quarto volume de sua obra, Kenny abrange o período do início do século XIX ao término do século XX: de Bentham a Derrida. Os capítulos um a três dispõem de uma apresentação cronológica dos autores, e do quatro ao doze são apresentados vários temas (lógica, linguagem, epistemologia, metafísica, filosofia da mente, ética, estética, filosofia política e Deus), articulando-se as respectivas interpretações dos autores do período para tais temas.
Nesse volume, Kenny apresenta o utilitarismo de Bentham e de John Mill, as filosofias de Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, de Marx, de Darwin, de Newman e de Nietzsche. Em seguida, aborda o pragmatismo de Peirce, William James, a filosofia analítica de Russell e do primeiro Wittgenstein, o positivismo lógico, e a filosofia da linguagem do segundo Wittgenstein. Apresenta também a filosofia de Husserl e o existencialismo de Heidegger e Sartre. Ainda trata da filosofia dos não-filósofos (devido a sua importância para a filosofia do século XX) de Freud e Derrida. É uma obra de fôlego e de cuidadosa análise do pensamento dos autores referidos.
Nesse volume, Kenny apresenta o utilitarismo de Bentham e de John Mill, as filosofias de Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, de Marx, de Darwin, de Newman e de Nietzsche. Em seguida, aborda o pragmatismo de Peirce, William James, a filosofia analítica de Russell e do primeiro Wittgenstein, o positivismo lógico, e a filosofia da linguagem do segundo Wittgenstein. Apresenta também a filosofia de Husserl e o existencialismo de Heidegger e Sartre. Ainda trata da filosofia dos não-filósofos (devido a sua importância para a filosofia do século XX) de Freud e Derrida. É uma obra de fôlego e de cuidadosa análise do pensamento dos autores referidos.
April 12, 2021
The last volume of seminal Anthony Kenny's work on history of Western philosophy. This time - modernity. The volume begins with Bentham and Mill and ends with Rawls. This book is masterfully crafted, but still a bit hard to read because of the density and vastness of the topic. A big portion of the continental - analytic tradition is not touched at all and focus is more on the 19th century and early 20th than any later time. Author has a visible contempt for Derrida, although he expresses it in a pretty ironic deconstruction of Derrida himself using his own methods. The earlier installments of the series felt more robust, which is explainable by the fact that Kenny was going for the time long gone, for which he had almost no passion or bitterness. It is much harder and possibly impossible to judge your own time sine ira et studio, so this volume is a bit more rowdy in that dimension. Nevertheless, if you're going for the history of modern philosophy and by modern you mean not-so-modern-but-rather-recent, that is a nice book to have.
August 4, 2019
Kenny writes using a very clear and concise style with minimal use of philosophical jargon that only serves to obfuscate the ideas presented. However, in terms of content, this volume is written with a heavy analytic bias and leaves little room for continental philosophy. It also doesn't cover many of the important philsophers after the ~1960s.
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April 29, 2020ıts good enough for all status of philosophy readers. it contains both east and west philosophical theory. I like too much.
April 19, 2022
wittgenstein cuts through the absurd self involved excesses of everyone else like alexander did the gordian knot
August 25, 2016
The final volume in this four volume set: the decline of modernity and the rise of post-modernity.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews