History of Philosophy

Weber’s History of Philosophy has long been a standard work in which thoroughness of scholarship and vividness of style have been uniquely combined. The purpose of this edition is to make that text more useful without altering those essential features which have commended it to so many teachers of philosophy in English-speaking countries. The new material which I have added is designed to bring the account of modern philosophy down to the present. In writing these additional chapters I have been concerned to fill in the middle foreground rather than to deal with strictly contemporary thought. My aim has been to resent only those recent philosophers whose doctrines have become a part of history. Among these are some who are still living, but whose earlier teachings are already a part of the European and American tradition. The omission or brief mention of contemporary thinkers does not imply an adverse estimate of their importance, but only the judgment that they are so much of the present that it is impossible to see them in historical perspective. At the same time I have endeavoured in some measure to correct the provincialism which characterizes most histories of recent philosophy, and to direct the attention of English-speaking students to the philosophy of France, Germany and Italy. In a word, this revision is designed to remove obsolete or unessential annotations, and to introduce the present-day student of philosophy to all the great philosophical doctrines and systems that have secured a permanent place in European and American thought.