The Little Book of Philosophy (Big Ideas)

Recommend it!

A fantastic little book for the price. Okay, the font is quite small and the paper quality isn't great but what do you expect? I picked this up for £1.99!What you do get though is a snapshot into the world of philosophy, from the classic thinkers right up to modern-day. Take what you find interesting and branch out from there...A huge amount of information in one book!I even bought a second copy to give as a gift.

I expected a better quality publication from Dorling Kindersley.The print is small; the paper is inferior and the Index is inaccurate.The content is good, though. Difficult concepts are given clear, unpretentious treatment making them accessible to a beginner like me.

If you are looking for a short but concise chronological summery of philosophy this book is the one for you. It presents information in a very digestible way and builds knowledge. Great book.

For an introduction to philosophy a lot of the concepts are explained in a very pretentious way so that you kinda understand a little bit but not a lot

Super little book for anyone interested in philosophy. Loads of interesting info which is easy to read and understand

Everything was perfect, thank you!

As the owner of an ancient and mediocre philosophy degree, I have some basis of knowledge for reviewing this. There are stacks of short guides like this to Western philosophy, and trying to cover the whole scope in 200 pages is a tall order. It is an excellent attempt, with the odd exception.The book is presented in four chapters, starting with the ancient Greeks and ending in the present day. Within each chapter, the sections consist of one to six pages each for a prominent philosopher and some of his/her main ideas, together with a short biography, a thumbnail positioning their thinking context and (for some) a basic flow diagram showing the logic by which their ideas developed.The book gives excellent exposition concisely but with a wealth of detail. Generally the historical linkages in the development of the various strands are well explained.For me, it falls short on a few points:-The scope of the section on each philosopher is specifically confined to their work on the one topic for which they are best known, e.g.. It would have been useful for those new to the subject if this limitation had been clearly explained, as there are many philosophers who have made significant contributions in several different areas. So, for example, the section on Russell is concerned purely with his work on ethics, and although it classifies his approach as “analytic philosophy” it neither explains the term nor covers Russell’s pioneering role in this discipline. (Perhaps I’m getting too used to the good cross-referencing of the better areas of Wikipedia, but one thing leads to another, and no work on philosophy, however short, should use a term without defining it.-Oddly for a book produced for the UK market, there is very little on British philosophy after Wittgenstein. So, for example, there is no mention on the development of “ordinary language philosophy” after Wittgenstein, and none of G E Moore (as another of the founders of analytic philosophy, and – in another part of the wood – he who defined the “naturalistic fallacy”, which had a major impact on the twentieth-century view of ethics).-Other than the scope issues above, I had a quick look to see if any of the detail fells short. I was disappointed with the claim that logical positivism, in its original version, “accepts as true only statements that can be empirically verified”. In fact it also accepts statements that are “analytically true”, i.e those of logic and mathematics. (Having not gone this far, it is then impossible for the book to point out that this verificationist principle fails its own test!)Sorry if I’ve been picky, but philosophers are notoriously picky, and it would have been feasible to address the issues I have raised without much expansion of the text.One other (non-philosophical) niggle: my copy is a published version, not a proof copy, but the index has been edited carelessly: several index entries are one page out, one has page numbers not in sequence, and one references the same page twice. Quality control needed by DK.Don’t let my nit-picking put you off too much – this book is probably as good a starting-point as any.