Abstract

A Brief History of Western Philosophy is a stimulating, impressive work by one of Britain’s leading philosophers. It is valuable both as an introduction to the history of ideas as well as a record of a distinguished philosopher’s mature reflections. In the Preface, Anthony Kenny aligns his book with Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy for, like Russell, he seeks to reach “the general educated reader, who has no special training, and who wishes to learn the contribution that philosophy has made to the culture we live in”. He succeeds admirably and improves on many of the maladies of Russell’s entertaining but notoriously partisan, sometimes eccentric masterpiece. In part, Kenny’s book may surpass Russell’s because of the fifty years of scholarship that separate them, but more specifically it may do so because of Kenny’s own first-rate contributions to the study of the history of philosophy. To put matters quite simply, Kenny is a better historian than Russell. From the standpoint of studies in the history of philosophy, I would not trade Kenny’s Aquinas, Descartes, or Wycliff for Russell’s Leibniz.