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"One Hundred Philosophers"
Mar. 27th, 2006 05:00 pmI recently read One Hundred Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers, by Peter J. King. It's what it sounds like; King selects one hundred noteworthy philosophers, from antiquity to the present, and gives each a page or two1, briefly outlining their lives, the questions they consider(ed), and the answers they arrive(d) at. The hundred include all of the usual Western heavy hitters, but also a fair sampling of Chinese, Indian, and Muslim thinkers and a number of lesser-known figures.
I came to this with the knowledge of an educated layman; I did not take any philosophy courses in college (not even GenEd), but have tried to read a scattering of classic works. At that level, then, it's an interesting and perhaps useful book.
In some respects I was dissatisfied with it. Some of the lesser-known thinkers get rather short shrift; in some cases, especially contemporary third-world philosophers such as Allameh Iqbal and Kwasi Wiredu, King says almost nothing about their actual ideas. If they're important enough to include in a list of the top one hundred, then they deserve a bit better treatment. (The choice of the one hundred is, as King admits, somewhat arbitrary; he gives a long list of other candidates. The allocation of one page or two seems somewhat less arbitrary, but still occasionally odd.) There were also more than a few typos or outright errors that I caught (and if I caught that many, there are likely to be yet more that I missed).
Nonetheless, such information as it does contain is often interesting enough. There are no surprises in the material on the best-known philosophers, but King does a decent job of putting them in context. (Each segment includes a list of philosophers who influenced the one under discussion, and a list of those who were influenced by him/her.) There are a number of lesser-known (to me) philosophers on the roster - Peter Strawson, David Lewis, Gottlob Frege - whose ideas sound interesting. (I'm a bit embarrassed by how little I know about Frege, since he played a major role in the development of the philosophy of mathematics around the turn of the twentieth century.) Perhaps I should look into their works.
It's not a great work, I think. I suspect that a trained philosopher, or even a dilettante, wouldn't find it very informative. For someone at my level of knowledge, though, it seems useful.
1. That means "either one page or two pages", not "somewhere between one and two pages".
I came to this with the knowledge of an educated layman; I did not take any philosophy courses in college (not even GenEd), but have tried to read a scattering of classic works. At that level, then, it's an interesting and perhaps useful book.
In some respects I was dissatisfied with it. Some of the lesser-known thinkers get rather short shrift; in some cases, especially contemporary third-world philosophers such as Allameh Iqbal and Kwasi Wiredu, King says almost nothing about their actual ideas. If they're important enough to include in a list of the top one hundred, then they deserve a bit better treatment. (The choice of the one hundred is, as King admits, somewhat arbitrary; he gives a long list of other candidates. The allocation of one page or two seems somewhat less arbitrary, but still occasionally odd.) There were also more than a few typos or outright errors that I caught (and if I caught that many, there are likely to be yet more that I missed).
Nonetheless, such information as it does contain is often interesting enough. There are no surprises in the material on the best-known philosophers, but King does a decent job of putting them in context. (Each segment includes a list of philosophers who influenced the one under discussion, and a list of those who were influenced by him/her.) There are a number of lesser-known (to me) philosophers on the roster - Peter Strawson, David Lewis, Gottlob Frege - whose ideas sound interesting. (I'm a bit embarrassed by how little I know about Frege, since he played a major role in the development of the philosophy of mathematics around the turn of the twentieth century.) Perhaps I should look into their works.
It's not a great work, I think. I suspect that a trained philosopher, or even a dilettante, wouldn't find it very informative. For someone at my level of knowledge, though, it seems useful.
1. That means "either one page or two pages", not "somewhere between one and two pages".
