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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Dream of Reason takes a human, popular view at philosophy from the ancient Greeks forward to the Renaissance, treating this conversation as one of wise, fallible, and occasionally funny humans through the ages. These were people grappling with Big Questions, namely what is the universe made of, how did it come to be, and how do people lead meaningful lives, and while their answers do not match modern understandings, they are foundational. For someone with a fairly weak background in philosophy, especially the older stuff, it's a good supplement to a missed classical education.
The first few chapters, on the pre-Socratics, are necessarily weaker, given that the surviving works of these authors is measured in a few hundred lines, and sometimes even a handful of direct words and a maze of quotations and commentaries. The book fully arrives with Socrates, who's method of systematic questioning set the form for much of what follows. Plato and Aristotle get detailed overviews as well, with their foundational works on ethics, metaphysics, as well as more practical topics like logic and biology.
What follows after the big three is less good. Gottlieb has less sympathy for the efforts of the stoics, epicureans, and skeptics to flesh out frameworks in the wake of Aristotle. Medieval theology, and the effort to synthesize non-heretical Christian theology with neoplatonist mysticism is mostly a dead end. One thing which I learned was that the scientific reaction against Aristotle was more rhetoric than reality. Aristotle couldn't have been the stifling authority on Western learning during the Middle Ages, because he was almost lost entirely, only being preserved by Arab philosophers (a sadly absent chapter). The abstruse commentary style of the scholastics has little in common with Aristotle, who can be tedious, but is generally a model of clarity. While Aristotle's physics lack the tools of quantified measurement which make modern physics work, he was a dedicated empiricist.
Fun and informative, and not exactly unbiased, The Dream of Reason is a solid introduction and overview.
The first few chapters, on the pre-Socratics, are necessarily weaker, given that the surviving works of these authors is measured in a few hundred lines, and sometimes even a handful of direct words and a maze of quotations and commentaries. The book fully arrives with Socrates, who's method of systematic questioning set the form for much of what follows. Plato and Aristotle get detailed overviews as well, with their foundational works on ethics, metaphysics, as well as more practical topics like logic and biology.
What follows after the big three is less good. Gottlieb has less sympathy for the efforts of the stoics, epicureans, and skeptics to flesh out frameworks in the wake of Aristotle. Medieval theology, and the effort to synthesize non-heretical Christian theology with neoplatonist mysticism is mostly a dead end. One thing which I learned was that the scientific reaction against Aristotle was more rhetoric than reality. Aristotle couldn't have been the stifling authority on Western learning during the Middle Ages, because he was almost lost entirely, only being preserved by Arab philosophers (a sadly absent chapter). The abstruse commentary style of the scholastics has little in common with Aristotle, who can be tedious, but is generally a model of clarity. While Aristotle's physics lack the tools of quantified measurement which make modern physics work, he was a dedicated empiricist.
Fun and informative, and not exactly unbiased, The Dream of Reason is a solid introduction and overview.