FIFTY years ago, the two most popular histories of Western philosophy were Bertrand Russell’s large single-volume History of Western Philosophy (1946, second edition, 1961) and Frederick Copleston’s multi-slim-volumed A History of Philosophy (1946-75).
Both chose to ignore one popular modern concern, the desire to be more comprehensive in the inclusion of Asian developments, reflected in more recent attempts, for example David Cooper’s World Philosophies: An historical introduction (2003). But, even if fairer, the cost in any deeper understanding can sometimes be quite significant, as readers struggle back and forth with the challenge of fundamentally different underlying presuppositions. So, Russell and Copleston still have their advantage as some sort of continuous story is told.
Their approaches, however, proved quite different. Russell was a man of boundless self-assurance who insisted that such history could be clearly seen to culminate amid “the welter of conflicting fanaticisms” in his own recommended method of “logical analysis” and “scientific truthfulness.” Despite his arrogance, however, the work is still well worth reading, because Russell’s unvarnished prejudices encourage readers, even as they laugh or smile, to develop their own independent judgements. Here, for example, is his verdict on Socrates: “there is something smug or unctuous about him, which reminds one of a bad type of cleric”! Copleston’s was the much more serious effort, the product of a lifetime of careful and serious engagement.
From 1970 to 1974, Copleston was Principal of Heythrop College, the Jesuit institution that was once part of the University of London. In his teaching work there, he was eventually succeeded by another distinguished Jesuit philosophical theologian, Anthony Carroll. Now an Anglican chaplain in Spain, he has created an abridged version of Copleston, competitively reduced to an even shorter length than Russell’s work. It is a consummate success, not least in bringing to the fore certain themes that occurred throughout Copleston’s volumes, not least what Carroll describes as the dialectic interaction between the One and the Many in successive systems. More simply put, Carroll enables us to see more clearly the repeated search for a founding principle that is treated as divine in placement even if not always in actual terminology.
Inevitably, over the intervening years, greater clarity has come in understanding some philosophers’ intentions; so Carroll has rightly sometimes introduced more recent scholars to his exposition. Indeed, this occurs in the very first chapter, with Jonathan Barnes’s convincing explanation of why the early Greek scientists can legitimately also be seen as philosophers (the Pre-Socratics).
An attempt is also made to bring the story up to the present time, in a final chapter in which Carroll suggests that the most significant philosophers of the past 50 years are Jürgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. The Scot and Canadian are probably discussed last because both are Roman Catholics and both might be seen as continuing to offer system resolutions (for personal morality and social ethics) that still keep to Copleston’s dynamic of the One and Many. But the agnostic German Habermas remains as the counter-voice, in his claim that religion in its particularity cannot contribute to the universalising tendency that is the ideal of modernity. So, it is perhaps not unsurprising that Carroll ends with a call for more engagement with contemporary issues.
Inevitably, readers will sometimes disagree with how the story is told. My own particular complaint would lie with the extraordinarily short space given to Plato: a mere four pages, which puts him on a par with some very minor philosophers such as the Russian Pyotr Chaadaev. Admittedly, more space is given to Neo-Platonism, but the result remains that the echo of Plato continuing up to modern times is scarcely heard, while quite a few philosophers in the same tradition are ignored entirely, as with Renaissance Platonism or the Anglican Cambridge Platonists. Despite such occasional faults, though, Carroll has done sterling work in bringing Copleston’s comprehensive work to a new generation.
The Revd Dr David Brown is Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of St Andrews.
A History of Philosophy: The condensed Copleston
Anthony Carroll
Bloomsbury £35
(978-1-4729-5076-5)
Church Times Bookshop £31.50