Just Finished Reading: The Dream of Reason – A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb

This is the main course book for the philosophy unit I’ve just started so I had to read it. Fortunately for me it was very good and I managed to read the vast majority of it over Christmas at my Mum’s house. As you can imagine from the title it outlined the development of Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings in the Greek world. I didn’t know much about the pre-Socratics (such as Zeno of the Arrow fame) and to be honest they don’t interest me very much – being mainly concerned with mistaken interpretations of Cosmology and such. Things got more interesting in general (for me anyway) with Socrates and his two successors Plato and Aristotle. I haven’t read any Plato yet but I think that Aristotle rocks – even after being rather harsh on him in my first essay.

What I actually found most interesting was the later Hellenistic philosophers known as the Stoics and the Epicureans (and of course the Sceptics). You’ll be hearing more about them later I’m sure. The final section (which I didn’t need to read as it’s outside the timeframe we’re covering) was on the Medieval philosophers – of which their where precious few of note. All in all this was a very comprehensive (though not rushed) study of 2000 odd years of the human attempt to reason about the world and our place in it.

Gottlieb appears to really know his stuff and writes about it very well. He exhibits what can only be described as a love of his subject matter and not only manages to get this across to his readership – at least to me – but actually made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion with his sense of humour which I think must be pretty rare in historical philosophy books! This is definitely a book for the general interested reader and is, as one reviewer says, quite superb. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of reasonable thought.