Love's Philosophy Book

This is the best overview of western philosophers I've come across. The summaries are clear and concise; they hit all of the major themes; and they stay true to each philosopher's body of thought, without Stumpf interjecting his "own critical evaluation."

The book's subtitle is "A History of Philosophy," but the book is only about philosophy in the West. That point is acknowledged by Stumpf in his preface to the first edition. In that preface, Stumpf ties the thought of subsequent philosophers to that of their predecessors. "Because a philosopher writes with a knowledge of what his predecessors have thought," Stumpf writes, "his own work is at once a criticism of earlier thought and a creative contribution at the growing edge of philosophy." In making this observation, Stumpf presumably sees a developmental whole to Western philosophical thought. To what extent that is true can be debated. It could be that many philosophical thinkers bumped, independently, into common themes and common responses to such themes because that is what reality dictates. For example, does the Utilitarian focus on pleasure and pain derive from what the Epicureans thought, or because pleasure and pain are the common experience of humankind. A value in not limiting "a history of philosophy" to the West is to see how non-Western thinkers have looked at the more universal philosophical themes.