Specially written for a broad popular readership, but serious and deep enough to offer a genuine understanding of the great philosophers, Kenny's lucid and stimulating history will become the definitive work for anyone interested in the people and ideas that shaped the course of Western thought. I also like that in each period, Kenny engages in both a history part and a philosophy part, broken into branch of philosophy.

The text is also structured around only including certain philosophers and doesn't create loose ends by mentioning anyone only once or twice. If anyone understands Frege's symbolic logic or Wittgenstein in general, you are doing better than me. Although his two-sections treatment may not be the most desirable approach, his concrete introduction surely gives readers a very solid understanding on the Western philosophy. Sir Anthony Kenny continues his magisterial new history of Western philosophy with a fascinating guide through more than a millennium of thought from 400 AD onwards, charting the story of philosophy from the founders of Christian and Islamic thought through to the Renaissance. In this lucid and masterful work, the eminent scholar Anthony Kenny offers an indispensable resource - the most concise and compelling story of the complete development of philosophy available.

In October 2006, Kenny was awarded the American Catholic Philosophical Association's Aquinas Medal for his significant contributions to philosophy. This book feels far too dense for what its worth- Kenny focuses far too much on breaking down the works of philosophers rather than showing how this movement begat that. Chatper 20 (Darwain, Newman and Freud) is to me out of place - would have preferred something on existentialism rather. During the period 1989–99, he was both Warden of Rhodes House (manager of the Rhodes Scholarship program) and Professorial Fellow of St John's College and thereafter Fellow Emeritus. Kenny, inevitably colored by some bias, finds a way to present even the most antiquated ideas in a way that does justice to the originator or advocate of the idea.

This is exemplified in the beginnings of sixteenth century "thought control" and the consequent first attempts to define "free will" (of Molina) as "liberty of indifference" (p. As the first book since Bertrand Russell's 1945 A History of Western Philosophy to offer a concise single-author review of the complete history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the modern masters of the 20 th century, Kenny's work fills a critical gap in the modern philosophy reading list and offers valuable guidance for the general reader of philosophy an ideal starting point for anyone with an interest in great thinkers and the family lines of philosophical evolution. Nonetheless, the author tries to mention every aspect of philosophy briefly, and I had to further study these topics to widen the area of my knowledge.Kenny explained that a reader who is concerned with intellectual history can look at the chronological survey in the first section. The Aristotelian Ethics: A Study of the Relationship between the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. The fluency and elegance of the writing, and the sensitivity to cultural and historical context, together with the eminence of the author, will ensure a wide international readership. It is a richly detailed, critical look at philosophy, displaying both Kenny′s love for philosophical engagement and for good history. But then I found that, when reading Kant and Hume and Berkeley for example, that there are better lecture series and books on any particular time period or topic than what I find in here.