The Story of Philosophy

First published in 1926, Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy remains one of the most widely read popular introductions to Western thought. Rather than surveying philosophy as a catalogue of abstract systems, Durant tells it as a sequence of human lives, tracing the ideas of the great thinkers through the personalities and times that shaped them.

The book moves from Plato and Aristotle through Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, and Kant, on to Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, and the modern figures of Bergson, Croce, Russell, Santayana, William James, and John Dewey. For each, Durant sketches the life, sets out the central arguments in plain language, and offers his own candid appraisal of their strengths and blind spots.

Durant's conviction is that philosophy should not be quarantined from ordinary life but read as humanity's continuing effort to live wisely. His warm, novelistic prose and gift for the memorable phrase turned a difficult subject into a bestseller and helped fund the decades of research behind his and Ariel Durant's later Story of Civilization. Nearly a century on, it endures as an inviting, opinionated gateway for readers meeting the philosophers for the first time.