Abstract

Given its scope and the size of many Cambridge Histories, this volume is short. It is 751 pages long. The main text consist of 54 chapters of between 12 and 14 pages each. For comparison, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy is 968 pages long. One might ask why the present volume could not be allowed a similar length. 200 more pages could have made for a much more useful book, as I will suggest below. The brevity of the chapters makes room for a large cast of characters, and avoids concentration on the best-known texts in the history of ethics. The chapters cover not only Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, but also medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers, Descartes, Pascal, Bayle...