The Story of Philosophy

A popular history of Western philosophy told through the lives and opinions of a handful of major thinkers. Durant developed it from short pamphlets he had written for the Little Blue Books series, and its publication in 1926 brought philosophy to a very wide American readership. Rather than covering everyone, it gives long chapters to Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer and Nietzsche, followed by shorter accounts of Bergson, Croce and Russell, and of the American philosophers Santayana, William James and John Dewey. Each chapter mixes biography, historical setting and a clear summary of the main ideas, often with long quotations. Durant gives little space to the theory of knowledge, preferring ethics, politics and the question of how to live. Critics have faulted the book for skipping most of medieval philosophy and for its selective cast, but its narrative energy is the reason it is still read.

It shows how ideas grow out of lives and times, and it remains one of the most readable ways to meet the major Western philosophers before tackling their own books.