The New History of Western Philosophy
Rebecca Lann
[This year has seen the completion of Sir Anthony Kenny's acclaimed
four-volume series "A New History of Western Philosophy". To celebrate
the occasion we recently held a wonderful party at The Oxford and
Cambridge Club in London, and some photos from the night are below.
Sir Anthony gave a speech, and has kindly let us reproduce an extract
from it below. Here he talks about the challenges, questions, and
goals he encountered as he wrote the series.]
by Anthony Kenny -- During the latter half of the twentieth century
two one-man histories of philosophy had dominated the field. One was
Bertrand Russell's one-volume Brief History; the other was the ten-
volume history of the Jesuit Father Copleston. Each had its virtues
and vices: Russell's was brilliant but historically unreliable;
Copleston's was impeccably judicious, but rather a dreary read.
Ideally, a historian of philosophy should be able to read like
Copleston and write like Russell. Sadly, I could do neither: I could
not match the exhaustive scholarship of Copleston, nor could I imitate
the incomparable style of Russell, which won him the Nobel Prize for
literature. I settled on a modest goal: to be more accurate than
Russell and more entertaining than Copleston.
People ask me what I have learnt from the years of reading and
writing. At the top level, I have not learnt a lot. My judgement of
the very greatest philosophers now that I have finished the history is
the same as it was when I started. I would list as my six greats
Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant and Wittgenstein.
However, at a somewhat lower level, my opinion of certain philosophers
was significantly altered. There were some philosophers whom I had not
previously admired whom I came to appreciate greatly--to mention only
four, Plotinus, Abelard, Schopenhauer and Heidegger. I had not
expected to admire Heidegger, and I still would not claim to
understand him. But I have moved from a position of not understanding
him and thinking him not worth understanding, to a position of not
understanding him and wishing that I did.
I have also been asked whether any great philosopher went down in my
estimation as I got to know him better. The serious answer is no,
though I did come away with the impression that Leibniz was rather a
smoothy.
I also came to realise that some of the things that I and others had
thought were original in Descartes were in fact commonplaces of late
medieval philosophy. But that did not alter my opinion that he was one
of the greatest philosophers: he gave to the world at large what had
been the preserve of scholastic elite.
Descartes was, indeed, the first philosopher to write explicitly for
women. But this should not make him a hero to feminists. When Princess
Elizabeth (King Charles?I's niece) defeated him in intellectual
argument about the relationship of mind to body, he was reduced to
telling her not to bother her pretty head about the issue. The study
of metaphysics, he warned her, was dangerous to female health.
Now that I have written three further volumes after the first one on
the ancient world, I continue to think that Plato and Aristotle are
the greatest philosophers there have ever been. I have long puzzled
over which of them was the greater. I now think I have the solution to
the question.
Plato was the greater of the two as a philosopher--indeed the greatest
philosopher ever--because he really invented the subject out of whole
cloth. His dialogues are still among the finest introductions to the
subject because he wrote in ordinary language before any technical
philosophical terms had been invented. And he had no real predecessors
in what we now think of as philosophy, though there had been
inspirational gurus like Heraclitus and madmen of genius like
Parmenides.
But if Plato is the greatest philosopher, Aristotle is the greatest
all-round genius. He did not invent philosophy, he in vented science.
It was not just that he was a great pioneer in biology, zoology,
psychology and other sciences: he was the originator of the whole idea
of a scientific discipline. If we think of science as a co-operative
empirical investigation conducted in research institutes provided with
a library, and passed on to later generations through a curriculum of
courses, then we are thinking of something that first happened in
Aristotle's circle.
Aristotle is also a comforting figure in a more domestic context. I am
very happy to see here tonight my wife and members of my family. But
one of the sad things that emerges from a study of twenty-five
centuries of history is that at the highest level philosophy and
matrimony seem to be incompatible. One could draw up a plausible list
of a dozen great philosophers through the ages: Plato, Augustine,
Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume,
Kant, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein. All of those were bachelors. Among
the great philosophers only Aristotle and Karl Marx stand out as
happily married. But the poor Marxes cannot be held up as a paradigm
of a happy family, since three of their children starved to death.
Aristotle, on the other hand, shows that a philosopher can have not
just a happy marriage but also useful children. His son Nicomachus
collected together various scraps from his Dad's Nachlass and gathered
them into an all-time best-seller, the Nicomachean Ethics.
Of the four volumes of my history the most difficult one to write was
the last, because it was the closest. I have been lucky to have known
many of the finest philosophers of the last half-century: Gilbert
Ryle, John Austin, Peter Strawson, Elizabeth Anscombe, van Quine,
Donald Davison. This was a great privilege, but it had its downside. I
soon realised that all of these had much finer minds than mine, and I
could not hope to compete with them as an original philosopher. I
decided that the best use of my talents was to become a historian of
philosophy and to do my best to help others to reach up to the great
minds of the past.
The four volumes of "The New History of Western Philosophy" series are
"Ancient Philosophy", "Medieval Philosophy", "The Rise of Modern
Philosophy", and "Philosophy in the Modern World".
(c) Oxford University Press 2005-2007
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