The Story Of Philosophy Will Durant
Rosita Westhouse
After graduating from St. Peter's Preparatory School in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1903, Durant enrolled at Saint Peter's College (now Saint Peter's University), also in Jersey City, where he graduated in 1907.[6] Historian Joan Rubin writes of that period, "Despite some adolescent flirtations, he began preparing for the vocation that promised to realize his mother's fondest hopes for him: the priesthood. In that way, one might argue, he embarked on a course that, while distant from Yale's or Columbia's apprenticeships in gentility, offered equivalent cultural authority within his own milieu."[7]
In 1905, he began experimenting with socialist philosophy, but, after World War I, he began recognizing that a "lust for power" underlay all forms of political behavior.[7] However, even before the war, "other aspects of his sensibility had competed with his radical leanings," notes Rubin. She adds that "the most concrete of those was a persistent penchant for philosophy. With his energy invested in Baruch Spinoza, he made little room for the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. From then on, writes Rubin, "his retention of a model of selfhood predicated on discipline made him unsympathetic to anarchist injunctions to 'be yourself.'... To be one's 'deliberate self,' he explained, meant to 'rise above' the impulse to 'become the slaves of our passions' and instead to act with 'courageous devotion' to a moral cause."[7]
After leaving Seton Hall, Durant was a teacher at Ferrer Modern School from 1911 to 1913.[5] Ferrer was "an experiment in libertarian education," according to the Who's Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners.[5] Alden Freeman, a supporter of the Ferrer Modern School, sponsored him for a tour of Europe.[8]
Instead of tying human progress to the rise of the proletariat, he made it the inevitable outcome of the laughter of young children or the endurance of his parents' marriage. As Ariel later summarized it, he had concocted, by his mid-30s, "that sentimental, idealizing blend of love, philosophy, Christianity, and socialism which dominated his spiritual chemistry" the rest of his life.The attributes ultimately propelled him away from radicalism as a substitute faith and from teaching young anarchists as an alternative vocation. Instead, late in 1913 he embarked on a different pursuit: the dissemination of culture.[7]
Durant was director and lecturer at the Labor Temple School in New York City from 1914 to 1927 while pursuing a PhD at Columbia University that he completed in 1917, the year he also served as an instructor in philosophy.[5]
In 1917, while working on a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University, he wrote his first book, Philosophy and the Social Problem. He discussed the idea that philosophy had not grown because it had refused to confront the actual problems of society. He received his doctorate from Columbia that same year.[9] He was also an instructor at the university.
The Story of Philosophy originated as a series of Little Blue Books (educational pamphlets aimed at workers) and because it was so popular, it was republished as a hardcover book by Simon & Schuster in 1926[10] and became a bestseller, giving the Durants the financial independence that allowed them to travel the world several times and spend four decades writing The Story of Civilization. Will left teaching and began work on the 11-volume Story of Civilization.
Throughout their writing of The Story of Civilization, the Durants strove to create what they called "integral history." They opposed the "specialization" of history, an anticipatory rejection of what some have called the "cult of the expert." Their goal was to write a "biography" of a civilization, in this case, the history of the West. Not only would it describe the usual history of the Western world's wars, the history of politics and biographies of people of greatness and villainy, but also the history of the Western world's culture, art, philosophy, religion, and the rise of mass communication. Much of The Story considers the living conditions of everyday people throughout the 2500-year period that their "story" of the West covers. These volumes also bring an unabashedly moral framework to their accounts, constantly stressing the "dominance of the strong over the weak, the dominance of the clever over the simple." The Story of Civilization is the most successful historiographical series in history. In the 1990s, an unabridged audiobook production of all 11 volumes was produced by Books On Tape and it was read by Alexander Adams (Grover Gardner).
For Rousseau and Revolution (1967), the 10th volume of The Story of Civilization, the Durants were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature. In 1977, it was followed by one of the two highest awards which was ever granted to civilians by the United States government, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by Gerald Ford. The Durants received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1976.[11]
On April 8, 1944, Durant was approached by two leaders of the Jewish and Christian faiths, Meyer David and Christian Richard, about starting "a movement, to raise moral standards." He suggested instead that they start a movement against racial intolerance and outlined his ideas for a "Declaration of Interdependence". The movement for the declaration, Declaration of INTERdependence, Inc., was launched at a gala dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on March 22, 1945, attended by over 400 people including Thomas Mann and Bette Davis.[12] The Declaration was read into the Congressional Record on October 1, 1945, by Ellis E. Patterson.[13][a]
Throughout his career, Durant made several speeches, including "Persia in the History of Civilization", which was presented as an address before the Iran-America Society in Tehran, Iran, on April 21, 1948, and it had been intended for inclusion in the Bulletin of the Asia Institute (formerly, the Bulletin of the American Institute for Persian, then Iranian, Art and Archaeology), Vol. VII, no. 2, which never saw publication.[14]
Rousseau and Revolution was followed by a slender volume of observations which was titled The Lessons of History, which was both a synopsis of the series as well as an analysis of human history.
The Durants shared an intense love for one another as they explained in their Dual Autobiography. After Will entered the hospital, Ariel stopped eating, and she died on October 25, 1981. Though their daughter, Ethel, and their grandchildren strove to conceal the news of Ariel's death from the ailing Will, he found out that she had died while he was watching the evening news, and he died two weeks later, two days after his 96th birthday, on November 7, 1981. Will was buried beside Ariel in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, in Los Angeles.
In 1933, he published Tragedy of Russia: Impressions from a Brief Visit and soon afterward, he published The Lesson of Russia. A few years after the books were published, the social commentator Will Rogers read them and he described a symposium which he had attended which included Durant as one of the contributors to it. He later wrote of Durant, "He is just about our best writer on Russia. He is the most fearless writer that has been there. He tells you just what it's like. He makes a mighty fine talk. One of the most interesting lecturers we have, and a fine fellow."[1]
In 1930, Durant visited British India to collect information for The Story of Civilization. While in India, Durant was shocked by the poverty and instances of starvation he witnessed, to the point where he took a period of time off from his intended goal to write a short book titled The Case for India about the "conscious and deliberate bleeding of India" by Britain.[15] He also stated that "I began to feel that I had come upon the greatest crime in all history." when learning of the plight of India.[16][17] In The Case for India, Durant wrote that "The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning their career of illegal and 'legal' plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years."[18]
While Durant's work was well received by popular audiences, its academic reception was more critical. Classics scholar Moses Finley criticised Durant's The Life of Greece on a number of grounds, including the book's racial essentialism and support for the great man theory of history.[20]
It depends on what exactly you want to get out of your reading. Due to the formatting of this question being pretty subjective, I'll offer an overview of what the different books cover and what you will gain from reading them and you can make the choice of which one to read yourself.
The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers by Will Durant is a book that explores many of the major Western philosophers, putting their work into historical context and then elaborating on their main ideas. Russell's A History of Western Philosophy does much the same thing. However, one of the major differences between the two is their scope. Russell covers much more of the history of philosophy in his book, having sections that are completely omitted from Durant's work. These include a section on the Pre-Socratic philosophers as well as Greek philosophers that came after Aristotle. Durant only covers Plato and Aristotle's work. Durant also skips the Catholic Medieval philosophers and goes directly from Aristotle to Francis Bacon. It would be remiss to say that the scholastics had no influence on Western philosophy.
What Durant trades for in scope he makes up for in detail; while he does not cover as many philosophers as Russell does, Durant goes into much greater detail for most of the philosophers that he does cover. For example, Russell's section on Schopenhauer is around seven or eight pages while Durant's is around forty; Russell's section on Spinoza is around twelve pages while Durant's is around forty; etc.
c80f0f1006