History of Philosophy, Volume 1

Rating:
Summary: A homage to ancient philosophy: four and a half stars
Review: This work is not an introductory text. It's clearly intended for readers who already have an introductory knowledge of philosophy, but not necessarily a comprehensive knowledge. These readers will learn a lot from this book. Although this book is about the history of philosophy, rather than philosophy itself, Copleston provides lashings of detail on the beliefs and arguments of the main Greek and Roman philosophers. He doesn't shy away from complex arguments, and you'll find many passages that you'll need to read a few times and think about a lot.

Copleston doesn't attempt to transform every Greek and Roman into a proto-Christian philosopher. His comments tend in the other direction: he's much more likely to raise a Christian interpretation in order to warn the reader that this is NOT what the philosopher meant. In any case, discussing the relationship between earlier and later philosophy is perfectly appropriate in a history of philosophy. In fact, isn't that the whole point?

The only reason I don't give this "four and a half" stars is the use of Greek and Latin quotes. This might have been OK back in the 1940s when the book was published (we were better educated then!), but today's editors really need to do better by providing translations, especially where the use of Greek or Latin quotations are clearly important to an understanding of the philosopher's argument.