Reviews for Ten Great Works of Philosophy

The average rating for Ten Great Works of Philosophy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-03-08 00:00:00 Yelizavet Kitaynik This was my text in Freshman Philosophy in college. It was so good it gave me the impetus to take two more courses in Philosophy when I didn't even have to.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-01 00:00:00 David Seidenfeld Massive writing (some 600 pages) for such a small, almost pocket-sized book. Wolf edits and compiles "Ten Great Works" from some of the big names in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy. I only read the Hume section, and cannot comment on the rest of the book. The type was small and lines were very close together, of course for maximum compactness. This made it hard to read (beyond the usual dense, technical writing you expect from works of philosophy ). The selection of philosophy was decent, as much as any philosophers from the usual three major eras of Western Philosophy can be; I assume the translation is fair. My problem with this book is the central question of Western Philosophy: "Why?" All joking aside, it does not make much sense to throw together ten works, no matter how important or reputable they are, unless they are meaningfully or ideologically or otherwise related and relevant. I cannot imagine a single professor teaching all or even most of the texts in this book in a single class. They are mostly full (unabridged) texts, and not really of much use for an intro class (although I read the Hume for an intro class), and they're too diverse for an advanced, topic-specific course. If it were an abbreviated anthology, I could see the point: short texts, a few pages of comment each to orient the reader, preferably with a few pictures and in an easy, readable font. What you have here is just what the title says: Ten (Random) Great Works of Philosophy. I suspect a publisher just thought it would be a quick, easy buck to take a handful of texts in public domain, paste on a nice cover, and push the thing on universities knowing that there was some something for everyone (and the whole thing for no one). Good marketing, bad philosophy.