A History of Western Philosophy: A History of Western Philosophy

This book, 'The Twentieth Century to Wittgenstein and Sartre', is the fifth volume of a five-volume series on the history of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones, professor of philosophy in California. This series is a very strong, thorough introduction to the course of Western Philosophy, beginning at the dawn of the philosophical enterprise with the pre-Socratics in ancient Greece to the modern thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Sartre. It has grown, over the three decades or so of its publication, from one to four then to five volumes. It has remained a popular text, and could serve as the basis of a one-year survey of philosophy for undergraduates or a one-semester survey for graduate students. Even advanced students in philosophy will find this valuable, all major topics and most minor topics in the course of philosophy are covered in these volumes.Jones states that there are two possible ways for a writer to organise a history of philosophy -- either by addressing everyone who ever participated in philosophy (which could become rather cumbersome if one accepts the premise that anyone could be a philosopher), or to address the major topics and currents of thought, drawing in the key figures who address them, but leaving out the lesser thinkers for students to pursue on their own. Jones has chosen the latter tactic, making sure to provide bibliographic information for this task. This volume, 'The Twentieth Century to Wittgenstein and Sartre', starts where the last volume leaves off, as philosophy enters the turbulent twentieth century. The first major philosophical school Jones looks at is the idea of Process philosophy, which tends to take a nod from science and modern ideas of how we know things, and a realistic idea of what we do not, and perhaps cannot, know. Process philosophy often tends to get ignored now, save in theological circles, where the work of Whitehead have been taken on board.Other philosophers covered in this volume on the twentieth century include Dewey, Bergson, Moore, Frege, Russell, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Wittgenstein. One of the primary fields of philosophy is epistemology -- how we know what we know, and do we know anything? All major philosophers have dealt with this, as metaphysics tended to take a back seat, and fields such as politics, ethics, and religion retreated to the background, at least as far as philosophy is concerned (the fields of political theory, etc., gained much ground in the twentieth century as separate from philosophy). Wittgenstein is the point at which Jones opted to end the series, as it becomes difficult, from an historical standpoint, to decide what of the past few decades should be incorporated. Philosophy is a slow-moving enterprise, and the 'hot' publications and thinkers today may fade quickly tomorrow, so predicting who will stand the test of time is difficult. Wittgenstein is also an appropriate philosopher to end with, given that when he wrote his magnum opus, the Tra