The Story of Philosophy

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The Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers is a book by Will Durant that profiles several prominent Western philosophers and their ideas, beginning with Plato and on through Friedrich Nietzsche. Durant attempts to show the interconnection of their ideas and how one philosopher's ideas informed the next.

There are nine chapters devoted to one philosopher each, with two more chapters each containing smaller profiles of three contemporary philosophers. The book was first published in 1926, with a revised second edition released in 1933. The book was originally published as a number of pamphlets in the Little Blue Books series of inexpensive worker education pamphlets. They proved so popular they were assembled into a single book and published in hardcover form by Simon & Schuster in 1926[1].

Philosophers profiled are, in order: Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The final two chapters are devoted to European and then American philosophers. Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, and Bertrand Russell are covered in the tenth, and George Santayana, William James, and John Dewey are covered in the eleventh.