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Voyage of Discovery: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy
Highly praised by reviewers for its clarity and rich exposition, this history of philosophy text illustrates philosophy as a process and not just a collection of opinions or conclusions. Lawhead helps students retrace the philosopher's intellectual journey rather than simply giving a report of the results so that the students see how the problems arose. Thus the philosopher's problem becomes a puzzle which the student has to face. Lawhead uses metaphors, analogies, vivid images, concrete examples, common experiences, and diagrams to bring the abstract issues down to earth and show the practical implications and contemporary relevance of positions.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 15, 2019
Cuốn này cung cấp một cái nhìn khá bao quát về triết học phương Tây từ thưở sơ khai đến nay. Mình đánh giá cao cuốn này ở điểm nó đã kết hợp khá tốt các yếu tố kể chuyện, sự chọn lọc các triết gia cũng như các tư tưởng có tính đại diện xuyên suốt lịch sử triết học phương Tây, đặc biệt so với một vài cuốn khác thì cuốn này còn bao gồm cả trào lưu giải cấu trúc, giúp mình lần đầu tiếp xúc và nắm bắt sơ qua tư tưởng của Foucault, một nhân vật mà mình khá tò mò mà chưa có dịp tìm hiểu. Về cơ bản thì đây là một cuốn mà mình thấy tốt cho quá trình tìm hiểu triết Tây, chỉ có điều không rõ do cách dịch, nguyên tác hay do bản thân triết lý mà có những chỗ mình không nắm bắt được, chỉ có thể hiểu đại ý, và nhiều chỗ thì mình nghĩ nếu không do mình đã có chút kiến thức từ trước thì cũng sẽ không nắm bắt được. Một điểm nữa mình không thích lắm là chương mở đầu :)) màu sắc khá giáo điều và có vẻ đây là một cuốn giáo trình cho sinh viên, vì sau mỗi chương sẽ có câu hỏi nữa. Cơ mà có vài câu khá thú vị đấy! (dù mình chỉ đọc phần câu hỏi để nghĩ :)))
P/S: vì cuốn này dài hơn mà lại có phần khô khan hơn Câu truyện triết học của Will Durant nên cảm giác sẽ hơi giống một cuộc marathon :)) nhưng khi kết thúc thì cũng để lại chút tiếc nuối...
P/S: vì cuốn này dài hơn mà lại có phần khô khan hơn Câu truyện triết học của Will Durant nên cảm giác sẽ hơi giống một cuộc marathon :)) nhưng khi kết thúc thì cũng để lại chút tiếc nuối...
July 12, 2023
"By exposing students to unfamiliar viewpoints that are outrageous, fascinating, perplexing, hopeful, dangerous, gripping, troubling, and exhilarating, the history of philosophy helps them gain a renewed sense of childlike wonder, teaching them to look at the world with new eyes. Finally, throughout the history of philosophy, students often find ideas that are liberating and challenging, leading them down exciting paths that were not even on their conceptual maps when they started the course."💫
“…philosophical issues lurk in everyday events.”
"We acquire most of our beliefs, concepts, values, and attitudes unconsciously. In other words, we “catch” our beliefs and values the way that we catch a cold. ...ideas and values are floating around in your culture. You simply absorb them, without thinking about them, but now they are your beliefs and your values. By studying philosophy historically, you will be able to (1) get a clearer picture of your own beliefs, (2) understand their origins, and (3) see what strengths and weaknesses others have discovered in them. In this way you will be in a better position to decide whether you want to consciously hold these beliefs or not."
"Like mountains, philosophical ideas contain challenges, beauty, mysteries, majesty, and drama that we can appreciate for their own sake, beyond any practical utility they may have."
'The Greeks thought that the poets were inspired by the Muses—the goddesses of literature and the arts. Inspired means “breathed into.” Hence, for the Greeks, the poets were inspired or filled with a divine spirit—no less so than biblical writers are seen as divinely inspired in the Christian tradition."
"The soul takes on the form of whatever it contemplates."
"According to Heraclitus, the world comes to us in the form of a riddle. “Reality loves to conceal itself”.
Socrates primarily gave us was the paradigm of the philosophical life—the passion to know, the conviction that everything else paled in importance compared to the search for wisdom, and the commitment to follow one’s questions wherever they may lead.
“Plato believes it is impossible to live the good life or to be a fulfilled individual apart from the state. …This contrasts with Christian thought, where morality is often viewed as the solitary journey of the individual soul in relationship with God.”
“For the ancient Greek philosophers, the notion that anything could come out of nothing was unintelligeble.”
"One of Aristotle’s fundamental convictions is that the structures of language, thought, and reality are the same."
"Aristotle was the first person to discover the rules of reasoning that we now call logic."
"These two aspects of individual substance can be captured by the notions of form and matter. The “whatness” of something refers to its form. Its “thisness” is its matter."
"You must rationally judge what are the right principles to follow, and your appetites, feelings, and emotions must be disciplined to follow those rules."
"...he speaks of virtue as “a state of character.” By this he means that a morally good person is not simply one who performs morally right actions but one who has developed a habit or disposition to do what is right. We can imagine someone who tells the truth on his income tax form—but only after he struggles with the temptation to cheat. By contrast, the truly moral person is one who tells the truth readily, happily, and without such a struggle. Hence, a well-formed character manifests itself not only in what we do but in our motives, our desires, our likes and dislikes. For this reason, Aristotle says that a good person “delights in virtuous actions and is vexed at vicious ones, as a musical man enjoys beautiful tunes but is pained at bad ones”
"Whereas the Greeks sought for truth and ultimate reality, the Christian message was that truth and ultimate reality (in the person of God) was searching for us. The ancient Greeks talked of the Logos, the principle of order and reason that permeates the universe. Capitalizing on this tradition, John began his Gospel by proclaiming that the Logos was identical to God and that in Jesus the Logos took on human form and dwelled among us."
"Many Skeptics believed that people find wisdom and happiness in pursuing the truth rather than in actually attaining it."
"No matter what the details of their metaphysics, the typical Greek thought human history follows the same sort of cyclical pattern we find in the seasons. Nations come into being, rise to power, and then fade away, and this cycle is repeated endlessly. There is little more to be said, for there is no overarching purpose to it all."
"In contrast to the Greek view, the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible said that history has meaning and a linear direction."
"To the Scholastics, as Peter Damian (1007–1072) expressed it, theology was the “Queen of the Sciences” and philosophy was her handmaiden. In Scholastic thought, faith guided reason, set its agendas, and gave it the main outlines and landmark truths around which philosophers could build their systems. In turn, Greek philosophy equipped them with tools for elucidating, explaining, and providing rational support for the truths of Scripture."
"If every form of wrong behavior were illegal, we would all be in jail! Generally, law should be concerned only with major evils, namely, those that harm others and undermine an ordered human society. In other words, human law is restricted to the sphere of people in their mutual relations. Hence, political legislation is to concern itself only with justice, and should refrain from issues that concern the spiritual community and private, individual morality."
“In the seventeenth century, the scientist and religious writer Blaise Pascal confessed that “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”
"Each of us dwells in our own, little “cave” in that our vision is limited by our dispositions, education, reading, and the authorities we admire. Our experience is filtered through our biases and idiosyncracies, so that our philosophy follows the pattern of our biography more than that of reality."
“People, unlike rocks or plants, have self-awareness. Because of this, we can be self-determining beings.”
"What makes you to be you?Imagine that certain of your physical properties, mental properties, personality traits, and previous experiences were different. Do you agree with Leibniz that such a person would be a different person from you? In other words, do you agree with Leibniz that all your properties are essential to your identity? If not, then where is the cutoff point? How radically different would the properties of this imaginary person have to be to say that this person could never have been you at all?"
"If Cartesian dualism is too problematic, then there are only two other possibilities. One is that reality is nothing but matter. However, Leibniz says this view cannot account for the existence of consciousness. To paraphrase one of his arguments, he says that if he could be miniaturized and if he roamed about in your brain, he would encounter all the machinery of the brain, but he would never encounter your pains, feelings, and sensations. Consciousness is distinct from extended matter. The only other alternative—and the one he supports—is that reality is basically mental and matter “is a phenomenon like a rainbow.” In other words, it is not something substantial in itself but is the product of something more fundamental."
"Furthermore, his notion that reality is a mathematically ordered continuum of forces foreshadowed the discovery of modern physics that matter and energy are interchangeable."
“As John Stuart Mill would point out a century and a half later, Locke’s emphasis on majority rule did not take account the possibility that the majority could itself become a tyranny just as dangerous as that of a despotic monarch.”
"Similarly, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Harvard argues that research with infants shows that such categories as space, time, number, and causation are part of our standard cognitive equipment, which has been “hardwired” within us through our evolutionary history."
"According to Locke, we are each like a person confined to a windowless room who only has photographs of what is outside. We can compare one photograph with another one, but cannot compare them to the world outside our walls. Who knows what distortions the camera lens has produced? To raise the problem in another way, try the experiment of comparing the similarities and differences between (1) this book and (2) all your sense experiences of this book. The experiment cannot be carried out because you never break out of the walls of your own experience."
"Kant believes Descartes made a terrible error by supposing he could know the self as a substance. Since Kant insists that substance can only be used as a category for unifying elements within experience, it cannot be applied to what stands behind experience. The self Descartes discovered was the empirical self. To distinguish the empirical self that we can know through introspection from the trans-empirical self, Kant refers to the latter as the “transcendental ego” or the “transcendental unity of apperception.” Although we must think of our experiences as if they are related to a unifying principle, this source of unity can neither appear within space and time nor be conceptualized through the categories of the understanding. This self is the ultimate subject that underlies all experience and can never be known as an object of introspection or scientific knowledge. Hence, it is a part of the unknowable noumena, and Kant refers to it as X, an undefinable variable."💫
"Marx says that the vision of hell in Dante’s Inferno pales in comparison to the inhuman degradation of industrial England."
“In contrast to Hegel, and the entire philosophical tradition as well, Marx says that ideas play, at best, a subsidiary role in causing historical changes. He begins with the undeniable truth that people cannot eat ideas, but must live on the material products of labor. From this premise, Marx quickly concludes that economic conditions are the base on which all human history is built.”
"If this sounds too much like a glib caricature, consider this statement by Marx: “The Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the manner in which they gained their livelihood which explains why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism, played the chief part”
"Kierkegaard’s father had grown up as a poor peasant but through hard work and good luck became so successful in business that he was able to retire at age forty. He was a deeply religious Protestant, but his life was tortured by a morbid sense of guilt for all his moral failures. The result was that he gave his son a very stern, oppressive religious upbringing. Kierkegaard later described it as “crazy.”
As a university student, Kierkegaard rebelled against the religious pressures of his childhood. He tried to squeeze out of life all the pleasure he could and worked hard at developing the reputation of being a happy-go-lucky, cultured, man-about-town. However, according to his journals, he was being eaten up by despair behind his carefree mask:
"I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me—but I went away—and the dash should be as long as the earth’s orbit—and wanted to shoot myself."
"Was there ever a time when you knew something was true with your intellect but it made no impact on your life? Is it possible to know something intellectually but not know it subjectively?"
“When we do not actively strive to be a self, our lives are as Hume described them, simply a passing flow of experiences with no unity and no center.”
"Whitehead complained that language only makes room for those thoughts that have been thought before. An original thought does not already have a home in our language, so our old language must be stretched or a new language created to accommodate novel ideas. He criticized the analytic philosophers for committing “the Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary” with their assumption that philosophical insights can be gained by analyzing language as it currently stands."
T"he difference is illustrated by the fact that Husserl thought “The wonder of all wonders is the pure ego and pure consciousness.” By way of contrast, Heidegger says, “Man alone of all existing things… experiences the wonder of all wonders: that there are things-in-being.”
“Heidegger thinks the early Greeks knew how to wonder at Being.”✨
"Because there is no reason or purpose for the fact that you exist and exist as this person in this situation, it is almost as though you have been thrown into the world."
"If I consider my choices to be pregiven and just accept the situation I have drifted into or grown up with, as though I had no possibilities, I will live inauthentically. In this mode of existence, I am mired in my fallenness. In contrast, living authentically means that, in the face of my thrownness, I recognize I am the one who has to make choices and realize my possibilities. Authenticity is taking hold of myself in my own way."
"Sartre cautions us against falling into the trap of labeling ourselves, for this is simply an attempt to deny our freedom. I might say, “I am a loser” or “I can’t change, because this is just the way I am.” Labels become our identity only because we make them so."
"Sartre uses the term bad faith to refer to the attempt to deny our freedom, to see ourselves as products of our circumstances, or the attempt to identify ourselves with our past choices while closing off our future possibilities. We feel a need to be an “in-itself,” a being that is defined, that has an identity. But this is because, as Heidegger pointed out, facing our freedom brings with it the burden of responsibility and the experiences of anxiety, anguish, and despair."
“…philosophical issues lurk in everyday events.”
"We acquire most of our beliefs, concepts, values, and attitudes unconsciously. In other words, we “catch” our beliefs and values the way that we catch a cold. ...ideas and values are floating around in your culture. You simply absorb them, without thinking about them, but now they are your beliefs and your values. By studying philosophy historically, you will be able to (1) get a clearer picture of your own beliefs, (2) understand their origins, and (3) see what strengths and weaknesses others have discovered in them. In this way you will be in a better position to decide whether you want to consciously hold these beliefs or not."
"Like mountains, philosophical ideas contain challenges, beauty, mysteries, majesty, and drama that we can appreciate for their own sake, beyond any practical utility they may have."
'The Greeks thought that the poets were inspired by the Muses—the goddesses of literature and the arts. Inspired means “breathed into.” Hence, for the Greeks, the poets were inspired or filled with a divine spirit—no less so than biblical writers are seen as divinely inspired in the Christian tradition."
"The soul takes on the form of whatever it contemplates."
"According to Heraclitus, the world comes to us in the form of a riddle. “Reality loves to conceal itself”.
Socrates primarily gave us was the paradigm of the philosophical life—the passion to know, the conviction that everything else paled in importance compared to the search for wisdom, and the commitment to follow one’s questions wherever they may lead.
“Plato believes it is impossible to live the good life or to be a fulfilled individual apart from the state. …This contrasts with Christian thought, where morality is often viewed as the solitary journey of the individual soul in relationship with God.”
“For the ancient Greek philosophers, the notion that anything could come out of nothing was unintelligeble.”
"One of Aristotle’s fundamental convictions is that the structures of language, thought, and reality are the same."
"Aristotle was the first person to discover the rules of reasoning that we now call logic."
"These two aspects of individual substance can be captured by the notions of form and matter. The “whatness” of something refers to its form. Its “thisness” is its matter."
"You must rationally judge what are the right principles to follow, and your appetites, feelings, and emotions must be disciplined to follow those rules."
"...he speaks of virtue as “a state of character.” By this he means that a morally good person is not simply one who performs morally right actions but one who has developed a habit or disposition to do what is right. We can imagine someone who tells the truth on his income tax form—but only after he struggles with the temptation to cheat. By contrast, the truly moral person is one who tells the truth readily, happily, and without such a struggle. Hence, a well-formed character manifests itself not only in what we do but in our motives, our desires, our likes and dislikes. For this reason, Aristotle says that a good person “delights in virtuous actions and is vexed at vicious ones, as a musical man enjoys beautiful tunes but is pained at bad ones”
"Whereas the Greeks sought for truth and ultimate reality, the Christian message was that truth and ultimate reality (in the person of God) was searching for us. The ancient Greeks talked of the Logos, the principle of order and reason that permeates the universe. Capitalizing on this tradition, John began his Gospel by proclaiming that the Logos was identical to God and that in Jesus the Logos took on human form and dwelled among us."
"Many Skeptics believed that people find wisdom and happiness in pursuing the truth rather than in actually attaining it."
"No matter what the details of their metaphysics, the typical Greek thought human history follows the same sort of cyclical pattern we find in the seasons. Nations come into being, rise to power, and then fade away, and this cycle is repeated endlessly. There is little more to be said, for there is no overarching purpose to it all."
"In contrast to the Greek view, the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible said that history has meaning and a linear direction."
"To the Scholastics, as Peter Damian (1007–1072) expressed it, theology was the “Queen of the Sciences” and philosophy was her handmaiden. In Scholastic thought, faith guided reason, set its agendas, and gave it the main outlines and landmark truths around which philosophers could build their systems. In turn, Greek philosophy equipped them with tools for elucidating, explaining, and providing rational support for the truths of Scripture."
"If every form of wrong behavior were illegal, we would all be in jail! Generally, law should be concerned only with major evils, namely, those that harm others and undermine an ordered human society. In other words, human law is restricted to the sphere of people in their mutual relations. Hence, political legislation is to concern itself only with justice, and should refrain from issues that concern the spiritual community and private, individual morality."
“In the seventeenth century, the scientist and religious writer Blaise Pascal confessed that “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”
"Each of us dwells in our own, little “cave” in that our vision is limited by our dispositions, education, reading, and the authorities we admire. Our experience is filtered through our biases and idiosyncracies, so that our philosophy follows the pattern of our biography more than that of reality."
“People, unlike rocks or plants, have self-awareness. Because of this, we can be self-determining beings.”
"What makes you to be you?Imagine that certain of your physical properties, mental properties, personality traits, and previous experiences were different. Do you agree with Leibniz that such a person would be a different person from you? In other words, do you agree with Leibniz that all your properties are essential to your identity? If not, then where is the cutoff point? How radically different would the properties of this imaginary person have to be to say that this person could never have been you at all?"
"If Cartesian dualism is too problematic, then there are only two other possibilities. One is that reality is nothing but matter. However, Leibniz says this view cannot account for the existence of consciousness. To paraphrase one of his arguments, he says that if he could be miniaturized and if he roamed about in your brain, he would encounter all the machinery of the brain, but he would never encounter your pains, feelings, and sensations. Consciousness is distinct from extended matter. The only other alternative—and the one he supports—is that reality is basically mental and matter “is a phenomenon like a rainbow.” In other words, it is not something substantial in itself but is the product of something more fundamental."
"Furthermore, his notion that reality is a mathematically ordered continuum of forces foreshadowed the discovery of modern physics that matter and energy are interchangeable."
“As John Stuart Mill would point out a century and a half later, Locke’s emphasis on majority rule did not take account the possibility that the majority could itself become a tyranny just as dangerous as that of a despotic monarch.”
"Similarly, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Harvard argues that research with infants shows that such categories as space, time, number, and causation are part of our standard cognitive equipment, which has been “hardwired” within us through our evolutionary history."
"According to Locke, we are each like a person confined to a windowless room who only has photographs of what is outside. We can compare one photograph with another one, but cannot compare them to the world outside our walls. Who knows what distortions the camera lens has produced? To raise the problem in another way, try the experiment of comparing the similarities and differences between (1) this book and (2) all your sense experiences of this book. The experiment cannot be carried out because you never break out of the walls of your own experience."
"Kant believes Descartes made a terrible error by supposing he could know the self as a substance. Since Kant insists that substance can only be used as a category for unifying elements within experience, it cannot be applied to what stands behind experience. The self Descartes discovered was the empirical self. To distinguish the empirical self that we can know through introspection from the trans-empirical self, Kant refers to the latter as the “transcendental ego” or the “transcendental unity of apperception.” Although we must think of our experiences as if they are related to a unifying principle, this source of unity can neither appear within space and time nor be conceptualized through the categories of the understanding. This self is the ultimate subject that underlies all experience and can never be known as an object of introspection or scientific knowledge. Hence, it is a part of the unknowable noumena, and Kant refers to it as X, an undefinable variable."💫
"Marx says that the vision of hell in Dante’s Inferno pales in comparison to the inhuman degradation of industrial England."
“In contrast to Hegel, and the entire philosophical tradition as well, Marx says that ideas play, at best, a subsidiary role in causing historical changes. He begins with the undeniable truth that people cannot eat ideas, but must live on the material products of labor. From this premise, Marx quickly concludes that economic conditions are the base on which all human history is built.”
"If this sounds too much like a glib caricature, consider this statement by Marx: “The Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the manner in which they gained their livelihood which explains why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism, played the chief part”
"Kierkegaard’s father had grown up as a poor peasant but through hard work and good luck became so successful in business that he was able to retire at age forty. He was a deeply religious Protestant, but his life was tortured by a morbid sense of guilt for all his moral failures. The result was that he gave his son a very stern, oppressive religious upbringing. Kierkegaard later described it as “crazy.”
As a university student, Kierkegaard rebelled against the religious pressures of his childhood. He tried to squeeze out of life all the pleasure he could and worked hard at developing the reputation of being a happy-go-lucky, cultured, man-about-town. However, according to his journals, he was being eaten up by despair behind his carefree mask:
"I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me—but I went away—and the dash should be as long as the earth’s orbit—and wanted to shoot myself."
"Was there ever a time when you knew something was true with your intellect but it made no impact on your life? Is it possible to know something intellectually but not know it subjectively?"
“When we do not actively strive to be a self, our lives are as Hume described them, simply a passing flow of experiences with no unity and no center.”
"Whitehead complained that language only makes room for those thoughts that have been thought before. An original thought does not already have a home in our language, so our old language must be stretched or a new language created to accommodate novel ideas. He criticized the analytic philosophers for committing “the Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary” with their assumption that philosophical insights can be gained by analyzing language as it currently stands."
T"he difference is illustrated by the fact that Husserl thought “The wonder of all wonders is the pure ego and pure consciousness.” By way of contrast, Heidegger says, “Man alone of all existing things… experiences the wonder of all wonders: that there are things-in-being.”
“Heidegger thinks the early Greeks knew how to wonder at Being.”✨
"Because there is no reason or purpose for the fact that you exist and exist as this person in this situation, it is almost as though you have been thrown into the world."
"If I consider my choices to be pregiven and just accept the situation I have drifted into or grown up with, as though I had no possibilities, I will live inauthentically. In this mode of existence, I am mired in my fallenness. In contrast, living authentically means that, in the face of my thrownness, I recognize I am the one who has to make choices and realize my possibilities. Authenticity is taking hold of myself in my own way."
"Sartre cautions us against falling into the trap of labeling ourselves, for this is simply an attempt to deny our freedom. I might say, “I am a loser” or “I can’t change, because this is just the way I am.” Labels become our identity only because we make them so."
"Sartre uses the term bad faith to refer to the attempt to deny our freedom, to see ourselves as products of our circumstances, or the attempt to identify ourselves with our past choices while closing off our future possibilities. We feel a need to be an “in-itself,” a being that is defined, that has an identity. But this is because, as Heidegger pointed out, facing our freedom brings with it the burden of responsibility and the experiences of anxiety, anguish, and despair."
October 14, 2020
Very, very dense and covering a wide range of prominent figures in Western philosophy. The author does a good job of taking a tremendous amount of information and compacting it cohesively and coherently.
October 13, 2025
第一本系统读的哲学史，体验非常不错。每个时期几乎每个重要的哲学家都介绍到了，而且不是单纯的观点罗列而是努力通过论证来凸显观点。语言很流畅，入门初学者读起来毫无压力。第一遍只看完黑格尔，后面的现代部分等以后有一些原著基础再回来看看吧。以后读原著时拿出来翻翻对应部分也能更好把握主线脉络。
September 28, 2008
Full disclosure: I took Dr. Lawhead's History of Philosophy I and Philosophy of Language courses, so take my advise for what it's worth. Still, I have read this book twice after graduation and used it as as reference on a number of occasions.
The book does a good job of explaining the major philosophers in the Western tradition, their philosophies, and how their ideas related to one another. It makes good use of straightforward language, effective analogies, relevant art, and useful diagrams together to make ideas clear without dumbing them down. At a hefty 571 pages, it's compendious enough to have some real scope (it was designed to cover two courses) yet shorter than some of the multi-volume works that have frightened away all but the most stalwart of readers (see Copleston's A History of Philosophy).
All in all, Voyage of Discovery does just what it set out to do: introduce the reader to the different traditions, debates, and philosophers throughout history that have shaped modern philosophy. I highly recommend it to new students of philosophy or even those who'd just like to know what philosophy is all about but lack the time to take an entire course.
The book does a good job of explaining the major philosophers in the Western tradition, their philosophies, and how their ideas related to one another. It makes good use of straightforward language, effective analogies, relevant art, and useful diagrams together to make ideas clear without dumbing them down. At a hefty 571 pages, it's compendious enough to have some real scope (it was designed to cover two courses) yet shorter than some of the multi-volume works that have frightened away all but the most stalwart of readers (see Copleston's A History of Philosophy).
All in all, Voyage of Discovery does just what it set out to do: introduce the reader to the different traditions, debates, and philosophers throughout history that have shaped modern philosophy. I highly recommend it to new students of philosophy or even those who'd just like to know what philosophy is all about but lack the time to take an entire course.
December 14, 2011
This was a great class; I had many reservations but in the end it turned out to be great
December 14, 2012
An in depth look at past philosophers. Some were quacks while others presented a logical stance or case on what they believed.
December 27, 2013
A superb introduction to philosophy.
Read
February 15, 2022This book has been a loyal companion in my life.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews