Product Description

In keeping with those virtues that have made it the leading collection of its kind, the fifth edition of Classics of Western Philosophy features unabridged works (or substantial selections) in pre-eminent and thoughtfully annotated translations and editions. As before, introductions by a team of distinguished scholars including: William Mann, Steven Cahn, Patricia W Kitcher, George Sher, Derk Pereboom, Philip W Kitcher, Charles Guignon, Israel Scheffler, and Jonathan Vogel offer authoritative guidance to the philosophers and their work. And now coverage extends into the twentieth century, culminating in a judicious, and non-technical selection of philosophical writings that are both classic in their own right and representative of main currents of recent philosophical thought.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3070577 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1050 pages

Customer Reviews

3rd Edition review
This review is based on the 3rd Edition. Cahn has collected a representative selection of the best philosophical writing from Plato to Mill (I understand he extends the range to include Nietzsche in the present edition.) For the most part, these selections comprise entire books, which is the best way to get a feel for the styles of different philosophers, and allows you to get to grips with their arguments directly - this is far better than having a third party interpret texts for you, as you are then at one remove from actually engaging with the work or thereby doing real philosophy yourself! Cahn's editorial imposition on the texts is restricted to providing brief biographical glosses to the philosophers included, to extracting generally decent-sized and representative chunks from very large texts, and to providing commendably brief, clear and occasional explanatory footnotes.

This book is not politically inclusive - there are no women philosophers here, and nothing by the great Muslim or Jewish philosophers (who lived and wrote in Mediaeval Spain and so must surely count as Western) - however, it gives you a great number of core texts essential in any exploration of the history of ideas, as well as offering a series of "great reads" which will delight and make you aware of the world and many problems of its interpretation. It is the best "history of philosophy" anthology I have come across and the ideal introduction to the activity of philosophy.

An invaluable sift
If you want to know how western philosophy got from Plato to roughly where we are now, this book provides the perfect overview. I'm using it, specifically, to trace the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant, a key period. Cahn's judicious selections provide the structural bones and a good deal of the meat of the arguments, allowing you to trace a line through all the major thinkers with remarkable speed. A process I'd expected to take years now looks achievable in a couple of months of dedicated reading. It's still a lot to get through and it's still only a beginning, but, to extend my skeleton metaphor, this is a solid spine from which to branch off in whatever direction you ultimately choose. Having the actual texts, in such generous quantities especially, is also a far better way to get into this material than going through the often distorting lens of secondary expositions.