A Little History of Philosophy

A short history of Western philosophy in forty brief chapters, written for young readers and adults new to the subject. Warburton moves in roughly chronological order, giving each chapter to one thinker or one idea and often opening with a scene from a life. He begins with Socrates questioning people in the streets of Athens and passes through Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Bentham and Mill, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche. The twentieth century brings Russell, Ayer, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil, Popper and Kuhn on science, Rawls on justice, Turing and Searle on thinking machines, and finally Peter Singer. The chapters are short enough to read in one sitting, and each points ahead to the next, so the book reads as one continuous story of arguments answering arguments.

It is the quickest reliable map of who said what in Western philosophy and why it mattered, written with unusual clarity for complete beginners.