Kirk Moodey reviewed The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant
/Some/ of western philosophy, as seen through the author's bias
3 stars
One of the points of reading philosophy from a wide variety of authors is to get an idea of what other people think, not just to develop your own. The lack of focus on non-Western authors is thus a pretty bad mark against this book. Secondly, it's bad because there are some genuinely really good gems from Eastern philosophy - 'a white horse is not a horse' is a nice logic puzzle that can shift how you view the world and help you analyze statements more critically, and it does it very quickly without needing hundreds of words. That automatically makes it more useful than half of Western philosophy. The title is honestly misleading and I would have bumped it up a star if it had been more accurate. Keep in mind the book was published quite awhile ago, according to Goodreads the first edition was 1926. Also, there's this …
One of the points of reading philosophy from a wide variety of authors is to get an idea of what other people think, not just to develop your own. The lack of focus on non-Western authors is thus a pretty bad mark against this book. Secondly, it's bad because there are some genuinely really good gems from Eastern philosophy - 'a white horse is not a horse' is a nice logic puzzle that can shift how you view the world and help you analyze statements more critically, and it does it very quickly without needing hundreds of words. That automatically makes it more useful than half of Western philosophy. The title is honestly misleading and I would have bumped it up a star if it had been more accurate. Keep in mind the book was published quite awhile ago, according to Goodreads the first edition was 1926. Also, there's this (the [] my addition): ' The author believes that epistemology [the philosophical question of 'what is knowledge?' with the secondary definition of the study of knowledge] has kidnapped modern philosophy, and well nigh ruined it; he hopes for the time when the study of the knowledge-process will be recognized as the business of psychology, and when philosophy will again be understood as the synthetic interpretation of all experience rather than the analytic description of the mode and process of experience itself.' My philosophy is inherently analytic in nature (as is that of many Westerner's) so this philosophy book doesn't even fully accurately convey Western philosophy despite its focus, ironically, due to the author's bias against such philosophy as 'ruining' philosophy. This is the inherent problem with trying to rank some philosophers as the 'greatest', you introduce bias instead of giving a neutral over-view for the reader to make their own judgement. One of the definitions of epistemology is literately 'the philosophy of knowledge', so he's tossing some of Western philosophy off a cliff because he doesn't like it. Even if we're generous and assume he really just meant the scientific study, that is some very poor wording!