Abstract

These are two agreeable volumes of a paperback series of six which offer a convenient introduction at a modest price to the history of Western philosophy. Selecting basic texts from the main philosophers with a succinct scholarly commentary, they present the beginner with the mainly epistemological problems of the 17th and 18th centuries. The seventeenth century Age of Reason saw the publication of secular philosophy in the vernacular and with dependence upon the new physical sciences rather than theology. Its dominant rationalism is firmly expounded from Hobbes to Leibniz, with special references to Pascal and Bacon as well as Galileo, Descartes and Spinoza. One expects a notable chapter on Spinoza from Mr Hampshire but his anti-metaphysical interpretation of Descartes’ Cogito, in terms either of mere psychology or formal logic, ignores the basic epistemology of its existential experience as fact. Sir Isaiah Berlin skilfully analyses the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment, contrasting the main British empirical movement of thought from Locke and Berkeley to Hume with its French allies, Voltaire and Condillac and its German critics, Hamann and Lichtenberg.