Philosophy, Little Book of Big Ideas

by Jeremy Stangroom

Book Overview

This smart handbook gathers a wealth of insight and information on 50 of the greatest philosophical thinkers and 10 of the greatest?theories ever conceived in a concise and accessible format. Readers... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• ISBN: 1552677761
• ISBN13: 9781552677766
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Prospero Books
• Weight: 1.58 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Good Sampler of Western Philosophy

This book describes 10 philosophy concepts and the main ideas of 50 philosophers, each in two pages of text. The coverage is limited to Western philosophy, spanning from ancient philosophy to postmodernism. Some of the chosen "philosophers" such as Freud, Jung, Skinner, Maslow, Darwin, Weber, and Piaget aren't strictly philosophers in the traditional philosophy-department sense, but I think Stangroom's choices are reasonable, the diversity adds value, and no single list of 50 philosophers will satisfy everyone anyway. I found Stangroom's writing style to be fairly sophisticated (not for "dummies") but still reasonably clear and straightforward. In almost all cases, I think he manages to discern and convey the key ideas fairly well. As far as the audience for the book, I think the book can serve as an effective introductory philosophy sampler for motivated beginners, though it's certainly too short and disjointed to serve as a comprehensive and systematic introduction to Western philosophy. And for those who are reasonably well-versed in Western philosophy, the book can still serve as a fun review and a means to fill in some gaps. Overall, I think this among the better philosophy-sampler books, so I recommend it.

Just What I was looking for

A terse, well-organized, "sound-bite" select version of the last millennium of philosophy: It gives the key philosophers, their contributions summarized in no more than a couple of paragraphs, the major concepts, schools and problems, all arranged so that the material "sticks to the brain." A small book that can be accessed readily and used as a handy reference. It would have been a nice bonus to have included a bibliography of the major works of each philosopher, etc. Despite this, there is enough meat to inspire further reading. This was what I was expecting in an earlier "one-star" version of books in this series, so this one redeems that earlier effort. Four stars