Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it.

In forty brief chapters, Nigel Warburton guides us on a chronological tour of the major ideas in the history of philosophy. He provides interesting and often quirky stories of the lives and deaths of thought-provoking philosophers from Socrates, who chose to die by hemlock poisoning rather than live on without the freedom to think for himself, to Peter Singer, who asks the disquieting philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our own times.

Contents:
1 The Man Who Asked Questions Socrates Plato 1

2 True Happiness Aristotle 9

3 We Know Nothing Pyrrho 15

4 The Garden Path Epicurus 22

5 Learning Not to Care Epictetus Cicero Seneca 28

6 Who Is Pulling Our Strings? Augustine 34

7 The Consolation of Philosophy Boethius 40

8 The Perfect Island Anselm Aquinas 46

9 The Fox and the Lion Niccolò Machiavelli 51

10 Nasty, Brutish, and Short Thomas Hobbes 57

11 Could You Be Dreaming? René Descartes 62

12 Place Your Bets Blaise Pascal 69

13 The Lens Grinder Baruch Spinoza 76

14 The Prince and the Cobbler John Locke Thomas Reid 81

15 The Elephant in the Room George Berkeley John Locke 87

16 The Best of All Possible Worlds? Voltaire Gottfried Leibniz 93

17 The Imaginary Watchmaker David Hume 99

18 Born Free Jean-Jacques Rousseau 105

19 Rose-Tinted Reality Immanuel Kant (1) 110

20 What if Everyone Did That? Immanuel Kant (2) 115

21 Practical Bliss Jeremy Bentham 121

22 The Owl of Minerva Georg W.F. Hegel 126

23 Glimpses of Reality Arthur Schopenhauer 132

24 Space to Grow John Stuart Mill 138

25 Unintelligent Design Charles Darwin 145

26 Life`s Sacrifices Søren Kierkegaard 152

27 Workers of the World Unite Karl Marx 158

28 So What? C.S. Peirce William James 164

29 The Death of God Friedrich Nietzsche 171

30 Thoughts in Disguise Sigmund Freud 176

31 Is the Present King of France Bald? Bertrand Russell 183

32 Boo!/Hooray! A.J. Ayer 190

33 The Anguish of Freedom Jean-Paul Sartre Simone de Beauvoir Albert Camus 196

34 Bewitched by Language Ludwig Wittgenstein 202

35 The Man Who Didn`t Ask Questions Hannah Arendt 208

36 Learning from Mistakes Karl Popper Thomas Kuhn 214

37 The Runaway Train and the Unwanted Violinist Philippa Foot Judith Jarvis Thomson 222

38 Fairness Through Ignorance John Rawls 228

39 Can Computers Think? Alan Turing John Searle 234

40 A Modem Gadfly Peter Singer 239

Index 246

Author:

Nigel Warburton is senior lecturer in philosophy, The Open University. He is the author of several popular introductions to philosophy and is the interviewer on the Philosophy Bites podcast. He lives in Oxford, UK.