I agree that Russell's book is good, although Will Durant's Story of Philosophy is even better. :-) Of course there's no reason you can't read both.
I found Durant to be much drier. He also covers less material, both in the number of philosophers and the breadth of each philosopher's work. It was still OK and I'm glad I read it, but I only kept one of the two and it wasn't Durant. It is shorter and skips most of the kinda-boring scholasticism stuff that Russell covers thoroughly, though, so it's got that going for it.
One of the things I appreciated about Russell was his willingness to critically engage the philosophy he's describing. I think it's why his book catches a lot of shit for "bias", but I thought it was nice to have an expert explain where certain parts of older philosophical work had been found to be insupportable or problematic (and why), which parts lived on in viable modern philosophies, et c.
Agreed. There is a fantastic quote from the early pages of History;
"There is, however, a more general argument against reverence, whether for the Greeks or for anyone else. In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind."
Thank you for this. I haven't read Russell much but I like this quote so much that I decided to put it on my reading list. In fact, I'm thinking about putting an excerpt from it on the syllabus for a history of science course I'm gearing up to teach this semester. A big part of why I'm an historian is because I really value the kind of empathy that he's talking about here.
Well, it's been almost ten years since I read Russel, and while I liked him at the time, I've done a lot of primary-source reading and I now agree that any reputation he might have for bias is very well deserved. Russell is absolutely a creature of the Western analytic tradition, seems almost incapable of taking anything else seriously, and engages in ad hominem (e.g, his section on Nietzsche) when he doesn't have anything to offer.
Reading Russell can easily give you a mistaken view of the thoughts of other philosophers, especially the more they diverge from Russell's opinions, which are by no means the indisputably correct ones.
Really, I think the OP should avoid reading the history of philosophy specifically, and focus just on general history. I'd recommend reading the classics, and always try to find the most complete works that are the most contemporary - read Herodotus, read Thucydides, read Tacitus, read Caesar, read Plutarch, read Carlyle, etc. You get a hugely different experience reading how people at the time thought and acted from their own perspective, or as close as you can get to it - at least from the perspective of someone who isn't a 20th or 21st century American with the associated values.
Comments
I found Durant to be much drier. He also covers less material, both in the number of philosophers and the breadth of each philosopher's work. It was still OK and I'm glad I read it, but I only kept one of the two and it wasn't Durant. It is shorter and skips most of the kinda-boring scholasticism stuff that Russell covers thoroughly, though, so it's got that going for it.
One of the things I appreciated about Russell was his willingness to critically engage the philosophy he's describing. I think it's why his book catches a lot of shit for "bias", but I thought it was nice to have an expert explain where certain parts of older philosophical work had been found to be insupportable or problematic (and why), which parts lived on in viable modern philosophies, et c.
Agreed. There is a fantastic quote from the early pages of History;
"There is, however, a more general argument against reverence, whether for the Greeks or for anyone else. In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind."
Thank you for this. I haven't read Russell much but I like this quote so much that I decided to put it on my reading list. In fact, I'm thinking about putting an excerpt from it on the syllabus for a history of science course I'm gearing up to teach this semester. A big part of why I'm an historian is because I really value the kind of empathy that he's talking about here.
Well, it's been almost ten years since I read Russel, and while I liked him at the time, I've done a lot of primary-source reading and I now agree that any reputation he might have for bias is very well deserved. Russell is absolutely a creature of the Western analytic tradition, seems almost incapable of taking anything else seriously, and engages in ad hominem (e.g, his section on Nietzsche) when he doesn't have anything to offer.
Reading Russell can easily give you a mistaken view of the thoughts of other philosophers, especially the more they diverge from Russell's opinions, which are by no means the indisputably correct ones.
Really, I think the OP should avoid reading the history of philosophy specifically, and focus just on general history. I'd recommend reading the classics, and always try to find the most complete works that are the most contemporary - read Herodotus, read Thucydides, read Tacitus, read Caesar, read Plutarch, read Carlyle, etc. You get a hugely different experience reading how people at the time thought and acted from their own perspective, or as close as you can get to it - at least from the perspective of someone who isn't a 20th or 21st century American with the associated values.