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This book is a brief, but cogent discussion of Western philosophy-- from Francis Bacon and Giordano Bruno through Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, Hume, Berkeley and Kant, the German idealists and Hegel, and ending with such nineteenth century luminaries as Mill, Spencer, and Nietzsche. Enchanted with Copernicus, Bruno goes to the stake for positing an infinity of inhabited worlds. Descartes, a professed skeptic, manages to justify everything the Jesuits taught him at La Flèche, while Spinoza, in mystical awe, envisions a pantheistic cosmos in which thought and extension are one and the same thing--God. The British philosopher, A.W. Benn, presents each thinker biographically and within the context of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries. (Pamela Nagami, M.D.)

"Man is the measure of all things," said the early Greek philosopher, Protagoras of Abdera. It was in this spirit of humanistic self-confidence that in the first half of the sixth-century B.C., Greek-speaking thinkers inaugurated the western philosophical tradition. In the Greek colonies of western Asia Minor, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes postulated a physical universe based on natural laws. Then in Croton in southern Italy, Pythagoras, enraptured by geometry and music, formulated the doctrine that all things are made out of number. And so, in recounting the life and teachings of Heracleitus and Parmenides, the Sophists, and finally in the life, trial, and death of Socrates, the Hellenic scholar, Alfred Benn, provides a short, but illuminating, survey of early Greek thought. (Summary by Pamela Nagami, M.D.)