Russells History of Western Philosophy goes beyond its explicit scope to offer an enlightening

discussion of human thought. Occupying the middle-ground between theology and science,
philosophy is the most all-emcompassing of disciplines. Human development is also permeated by
the tensions between social cohesion and individual freedom, prudence and passion. Theres a twoway intraction between philosophy and thought movements on the one hand and social live on the
other. Sometimes, ideas are theorizing about practices well under-way; when its the other way
around its generally because ideas are being imported. Russell divides the history of western
philosophy into three main periods: Ancient philosophy, from the 6 th century BC in Greek to the
fall of the Roman Empire, Christian Philosophy from the eleventh to the 14 th century, and Modern
philosophy from the 17th century to WW2, the period in which he is writing. Its interesting to see
how his reflections are influenced by the period in which he is writing. Ill make a summary of each
of the three books dealing with these periods.
Book I: Ancient Philosophy [deductive reasoning]
There are two commen views about the Greeks. One, held from the Renaissance until the 19 th
century, is revential. The other, spurred by the progress of science, sees the ancients as a sort of
stumbling block. As is often the case, the truth may lie somewhere in between. As we all know,
Greece was the birthplace of Western civilization. The backdrop against which their culture could
thrive were earlier developments in Egypt and Mesopotamia, like writing, which the Greek
borrowed from the Phoenicians, who in turn had adquired it from the Egyptians.
These civilizations practiced religion as a cult of fertility or a way to deal with death. Closely
related to religion was morality and its enforcement through the law; the oldest known legal code is
that of Hammurabi, King of Babylon (2nd millenium B.C.).
Another key factor was commerce, of which the island of Crete was the pioneer. From 2500
B.C. to 1400 B.C they dominated the seas and boasted an artistically advanced culture called the
Minoan. It spread to Greece before dying out and survived there for several centuries, being
depicted in Homer, for example. Then iron superseded bronze and sea supremacy passed on to the
Phoenicians. The more advanced Greek regions were the islands furthest from the mainland, whose
success was based on trade and naval power. Industry flourished by employing slaves who were the
spoils of war. Government shifted from monarchy to aristocracy and then to an alternation
ofdemocracy (slaves and women were not citizens) and tyranny (non-hereditary rule). The first
notable product of Hellenic civilization was Homer, whose works were completed by the 6th
century B.C and whose memorization constituted the most important part of Athenians education.
Traces of primitive religion, including human sacrifices,survived until the beginning of historical
times. These primitive beliefs were later channeled into the worship of Dionysus. Fate exercised a
great influence on all Greek thought, and perhaps was one of the sources from which science
derived its belief in natural law. In the 6th century Greek science and mathematics and philosphy
began. The Egyptians and Babylonians had rules of thumb about geometry and arithmetic, but the
Greek were the first to make deductive reasonings from general premisses.
The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by...forethought. This is possible when
a society becomes agricultural. Impulses are checked by custom, religion and law. The institution of
private property brings with it the subjection of women and usually the creation of a slave class.
Prudence versus Passion is a conflict that runs through history. The cult of Dionysus found a
refined version in Orphism which influenced mystically inclined philosophers like Plato and
through him Christian theology. There were two tendencies in Greece, one passionate, religious....
the other empirical, rationalistic. Greece was saved from religion by the rise of science.
Greek philosophy, as a pursuit tangled up with other intellectual endeavours, started in Miletus, a
rich commercial city that benefitted from intercourse with many nations. The better known
representative of the Milesian school, which was brought into existence by the contect of the Greek
mind with Egypt and Babylonia, is Thales, who is said to have brought some rudiments of

geometry to Greece from his travels to Egypt. He could work out the height of a pyramid from the
length of its shadow and the distance of a ship at sea from observations taken at two points on land.
He also famously said that everything was made up of water. There is a story about him in Aristotle
claiming that he showed that philosophers can be rich if they like, but their ambition is of another
sort. Thales was succeeded by Anaximander. He too posited that all things came from a single
primal substance, although this was not water. His idea of justice was that of a balance between
struggling forces. Perhaps this is best embodied in the Greek plates of justice. Anaximenes, who
completes the Milesian triad, thought that the earth was disk-shaped and added that the primal
substantance could turn into different elements depending on its degree of condensation.
Ionia was the centre of the Hellenic world until its subjugation by Darius in the 5 th century.
Subsequent philosophical developments tend to be more religious, of the Orphic kind, and took
place in the greek cities of Southern Italy.
Samos, a commercial rival of Miletus, was Pythagoras hometown. Mathematics in the sense of
demonstrative deductive argument begin with him, although he linked this science to a form of
mysticism. He left the island, however, because he disliked Polycrates, the ruling tyrant. He
established himself in Croton, which lived by importing Ionian wares into Italy, and founded a
society of disciplines. He was driven out by the citizens and had to move once more, to
Metapontion, where he died.
Pythagoras founded a religion whose main tenet was the transmigration of souls. A lot of the
mystical tradition that we see as opposed to a scientific mindset is an offshoot of Pythagoreanism,
as seen in Parmenides and Plato. This is not to say that his theory wasnt a step forward, since it was
an intellectual reinterpretation of Orphism and in ancient Greece the opposition between Passion
and Reason was respectively represented by the primitive and the Olympian Gods. He treated
animals on a foot with humans and considered men and women to be equal. His view of theory is
that of passionate sympathetic contemplation. There was an element of ecstatic revelation
informing his view of thinkers as creators of ordered beauty.
In ethical terms, Pythagoras was radically different from modern conceptions in that he valued
contemplation above everything else. This is to be explained as a consequence of the change of
values that go hand in hand with a change in the social system. The gentleman is the best
representation of the Greek genius: someone whose sole pursuit is uninterested truth, and belongs to
a society of equals who live on slave labour. With the advent of industrialism, practical deffinitions
of truth such as those of pragmatism and instrumentalism were substituted for contemplative ones.
Many sciences start up muddled up in some false belief (e.g., astronomy and astrology). For
Pythagoras everything was made of numbers and the real world should fit pure mathematics
rather than the other way around. He supposed that the world was atomic, with bodies made up of
atoms made up of molecules.
In mathematics we owe him terms that reflect the connection between music and numbers, like
harmonic progression and harmonic mean, as well as the other two Pythagorean means, the
arithmetic and geometric means, thinking of squares and cubes of numbers and the famous
proposition about right-angled traingles. Pythagoras theorem led at once to the discovery of
incommensurables, which led Greeks to establish geometry independently of arithmetic,
culminating in Euclid. (When Descartes introduced co-ordinate geometry, making arithmetic
supreme, he assumed the possibility of a solution of the problem of incommensurables.)
Geometry, as established by the Greek, starts from self-evident axioms and proceeds by deductive
reasoning. It then appeared for the first time to be possible to know things about the world by
applying deduction to self-evident things. This view influenced many philosophers, among them
Plato and Kant. The Declarion of Independence says we hold these truths to be self-evident. The
18th century doctrine of natural rights is a search for Euclidean axioms in politics. Newtons
Principia is fashioned after Euclid and so is Scholastic theology.
Mathematics is the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, and reinforced mystical
doctrines of an ideal world above sensible objects and influenced rationalistic (as opposed to

apocalyptic) religion) and many philosophers who blended religion and reason from Plato to
St.Augustin and Thomas Aquinas, all the way down to Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz.
Eternal world revealed to the intellect but not to the senses.
Between Pythagoras and Heraclitus there was a philosopher called Xenophanes who, in a longer
form, had the following aphorism : If horses had hands they would paint the forms of gods like
horses. Heraclitus was an aristocratic citizen of Ephesus who was at his peak arond 500 B.C.
Depite being an Ionian, he didnt belong to the scientific tradition of Miletus and preached that
everything was in a state of flux. This view is encapsuled in Platos Theaetutes as: You cannot
step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you. Ethically, he was
contemptous of humans and thought only force would compel people to act in their own good. He
advocated war with a proud asceticism similar to Nietzches, valuing power obtained through selfmastery and rejecting distracting passions. He opposed Bacchic religion but not on scientific
grounds.
Just as Thales considered water to be the most basic element and Anaximenes air, Heraclitus
believed fire to be the primordial element (their views where later synthesised in Empodocles who
also added earth to his quartet). Chemistry would not advance further until the Mohammedan
alchemists.
Heraclitus shared Anaximanders conception of cosmic justice, in which the balance between
elements will always be redressed. His doctrine contains the germs of Hegels philosophy, which
proceeds by a synthesizing of opposites.
Permanence, which is not to be found in Heraclitus, has been coveted since times immemorial.
Mystics have invented conceptions of eternity existing outside the temporal process. Science had
thought atoms first and then electrons and protons indestructible, but these views were superceded
by others based on change. However, philosophers have clinged to the idea of permanence as seen
in Parmenides.
Book II: Catholic Philosophy
Book III: Modern Philosophy [inductive reasoning]
Of the three, the first book is probably the best, since time lends perspective to history. Trying to
write history about the present is troublesome because were caught up in the process. Besides, for a
reading in the 21st century, there are notable absences like Existentialism, Phenomenology, Popper
and Kuhn, logisism, philosophy of language, some of Russells ideas were proven wrong...