Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources

Rating:
Summary: Great excerpts, good format, good reading.
Review: Modern Philosophy -- full of writings from philosophers such as Locke, Kant or Spinoza -- can be seen as a daunting period of philosophy. I read this book as a text for a modern philosophy class, and found that it is a very competant editing of these difficult texts. The anthology begins with "premodern" writings of Galileo and others, goes through Descartes (with a selection of criticisms of Decartes' work from his contemporaries), and then goes through the work of other modern philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, Spinoza, Libeniz, Kant, and others. The editor does a wonderful job arranging texts to illustrate the back and forth dialog and critisms among the philosophers. In addition to the selection of texts, there are wonderful notes scattered throughout the text to help alleviate much of the confusion that can arise after reading some of the quite lengthly writings of some (many! ) modern philosophers. Perhaps on an aesthetic (non-content) sidenote -- the book itself is excellent. When I was reading a section, I did not have to worry about pages flipping on me, because the binding is very flexible. In addition highlighters don't bleed through the page -- a wonderful plus to a great anthology! I would highly recommend it.