The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

The Story of Philosophy (1926) is a nonfiction book by the historian Will Durant. Believing that his fellow Americans did not possess enough education in philosophy, Durant wrote the work to provide a comprehensive and yet accessible account of Western philosophy. Durant takes a chronological approach, tracing the major developments in philosophy from Ancient Greece to some of the major philosophers of Durant’s own day. In doing so, Durant hopes to prepare the reader for a more in-depth look into those thinkers and the centuries-long debates that animated them. The book has gone through multiple editions and remains a popular introduction to philosophy to this day.  

This guide uses the 1926 hardcover edition by Simon & Schuster.

Content Warning: The source text contains androcentric language. It only includes Western perspectives, and makes some derogatory remarks regarding other cultures and their own contribution to philosophy.

Summary

Durant begins The Story of Philosophy with Socrates. He notes that philosophy begins not with the emergence of a superior mind, but rather a crisis where both religious and political authority had broken down, prompting a search for knowledge beyond what discredited authorities could provide. Socrates’s project puts forth questions which subsequent philosophers will debate for millennia.

In the writings of Plato, Socrates’s student and the chief source of Socrates’s teachings, these key questions include the nature of justice, whether the true essence of reality exists within or beyond perception, and what the best form of human society and government would be. For Plato, philosophers should be kings. Plato’s greatest student, Aristotle, made his name as the personal tutor to Alexander the Great, and then undertook a project of building a comprehensive body of knowledge on practically every subject including ethics, politics, aesthetics, and the classification of plant and animal life.

According to Durant, philosophy went into a long abeyance after the death of Aristotle, as he regards the Romans as having developed only a meager tradition of their own as they conquered the Mediterranean. After the fall of Rome, the Catholic Church inhibited philosophic inquiry with their strict insistence on doctrinal orthodoxy. Philosophy returned at last in the Elizabethan era with Francis Bacon, who not only compiled an extraordinary body of knowledge on his own, but also inspired the later founding of the Royal Society, which institutionalized scientific and philosophic knowledge and applied its findings to the benefit of society at large. Benedict Spinoza continued this legacy with a project of secular humanism that separated morality from religious doctrine, redefining ethics as what was good for human flourishing.

These ideas in turn helped to fuel the Enlightenment, which for Durant found its greatest personification in Voltaire. In addition to his voluminous writings, Voltaire lived out the ideals of his Enlightenment as an individualist, cosmopolitan, and dogged opponent of any authority not squarely based on reason and dedicated to the common good. When excessive faith in the power of human reason triggered a skeptical backlash, Immanuel Kant emerged to link both reason and morality to metaphysics, so that they were no less true for existing beyond sensory perception and empirical testing.

In the 19th century, philosophy grappled with the Industrial Revolution and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the former promising the triumph of mechanics over nature and the latter suggesting an unknowable dynamism within nature that will confound any attempt to control it. While Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer argued their respective sides of this debate, Friedrich Nietzsche emerged and launched a broadside against the notion of philosophy itself, calling for a new race of warriors and builders to undo the mess brought about by too many thinkers and teachers.

The early 20th century managed to endure Nietzsche’s onslaught and restore the prior terms of debate between industry and evolution, until the World War I (WWI) shattered the European political system. Durant closes the work with a look at some of the major philosophers of his own time, including Bertrand Russell and John Dewey.