Abstract

Scott Soames’s book The World Philosophy Made is a history of ideas spanning from the ancient Greeks until today.1 1 At nearly 400 pages of tightly printed text, the book is enormous in its scope, surveying ideas not only in philosophy but also in physics, mathematical logic, cognitive science, economics, linguistics, social science, legal theory and more. Among the topics discussed in detail are: the debate about immanent vs. transcendent forms; the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology; the heliocentric model of the solar system and retrograde planetary motion; set-theoretic reductions of number and the question of whether set theory counts as logic; Gödel’s completeness and incompleteness proofs; the Chomskian revolution in linguistics; public choice theory; the representational theory of mind; special and general relativity; the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; the libertarian challenge to Rawlsian liberalism; the relation between Marx’s philosophy and 20th century socialist political movements; the rise of the administrative state; the role of evolution and child development in the acquisition of moral sentiments; and death and the meaning of life. This is by no means a complete list.