---
title: "A New History of Western Philosophy"
author: "Anthony Kenny"
year: 2010
shelf: "ancient-roots"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Kenny+New+History+of+Western+Philosophy"
in_stock: false
related: ["copleston-history-philosophy-1", "copleston-history-philosophy-9", "hegel-lectures-hist-phil-1", "zeller-outlines-greek-philosophy"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "The distinguishing wager of the book is that one hand should carry the whole story. Where most modern histories are the work of committees of specialists, Oxford University Press invited Kenny to write, single-handed, a history from Thales to Derrida — first issued as four volumes (2004–2007) and here gathered within a single binding as four parts — on the belief that a single viewpoint can link ancient, medieval, early modern, and contemporary philosophy into one narrative of connected themes."
  - "Each part is built twice over: first a chronological survey of the period, then a thematic treatment of standing topics — logic, knowledge, physics, metaphysics, soul and mind, ethics, and God, with language joining the later parts. The historically minded reader can follow the survey and consult the themes for amplification; the philosophically minded reader can work the thematic chapters and refer back to place an issue in its time."
  - "The general introduction stakes out the question the whole book answers — why study the history of philosophy at all — and frames it through the split between Aristotle, philosophy's first historian, and Hegel, who hoped to be its last, and between viewing philosophy as a cumulative science or as an art whose problems recur. Kenny writes, in his own phrase, as both a philosophical historian and a historical philosopher."
references:
  - "Kenny, A. (2010). A New History of Western Philosophy. Oxford University Press."
  - "Copleston, F. (1946–1974). A History of Philosophy (Vols. I–IX). Image Books/Doubleday."
glossary_terms:
  - "philosophical historian and historical philosopher"
  - "chronological survey and thematic treatment"
  - "philosophy as science or as art"
  - "the therapeutic view of philosophy"
  - "ontology"
scholar_prompts:
  - "Kenny opens by asking why anyone should study the history of philosophy, and separates two motives: to seek illumination on live problems of one's own, or to enter the conceptual climate of a bygone age. For a library that reads old texts as living instruments of self-understanding, which motive governs when one returns to the ancients — the wish to solve a standing problem, or the wish to inhabit a vanished way of seeing — and can the two ever be kept apart in practice?"
  - "The book sets the Aristotelian view, in which philosophy progresses toward ever-clearer answers, against the Wittgensteinian view, in which the same questions recur because our language keeps returning us to them. Where a psychology takes its founding problems to be perennial rather than solved, does the therapeutic picture — confusions dissolved rather than truths accumulated — describe the work of depth better than the picture of cumulative science, and what is lost if it does?"
  - "Kenny writes that a single author, at a disadvantage against specialists in every detail, may by compensation see what committees miss, as an aerial photograph reveals a landscape invisible from the ground. What does his one-hand vantage over the whole tradition disclose that a shelf of expert monographs cannot, and where does the same distance risk flattening the very texture a close reader needs?"
seo_title: "Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy — Thales to Derrida in One Hand | Seba"
seo_description: "On Anthony Kenny's single-author history of Western philosophy — four parts from Thales to Derrida, each a chronological survey doubled by thematic chapters on logic, knowledge, mind, ethics, and God."
---

**One Hand from Thales to Derrida**

The organizing decision of this history is announced in its general introduction and never abandoned: that the entire Western tradition, from the first Milesian cosmologists to the philosophers of the late twentieth century, should be told by a single author from a single point of view. Most histories of philosophy in an age of specialization are the work of many hands, and Kenny records that Oxford University Press, in commissioning one writer to carry the story from Thales to Derrida, was betting on something a committee cannot supply — a narrative in which ancient, medieval, early modern, and contemporary philosophy are linked by connected themes rather than parcelled out to experts who need not speak to one another. The work first appeared as four separate volumes between 2004 and 2007; the present book gathers them within one binding as four parts corresponding to the original four. Kenny is candid about the price. A single hand is at an enormous disadvantage in matters of detail against scholars who have made one philosopher their life's field, and no one person can read more than a fraction of the secondary literature that has grown around every figure discussed. The compensation he claims is a matter of vantage: a history written by one author may bring out features of the whole that are less visible to committees of specialists, as an aerial photograph shows a landscape almost invisible to those close to the ground.

**Why Study the History of Philosophy**

Before the narrative begins, Kenny asks what the enterprise is for, and answers that the reasons fall into two groups, philosophical and historical. One may study the great dead philosophers to seek illumination on themes of one's own inquiry, or to understand the people and societies of the past by grasping the conceptual climate in which they thought and acted. A historian of philosophy, he insists, should make clear which task he is addressing. Behind this lies a deeper division over what philosophy is. Aristotle, philosophy's first historian, and Hegel, who hoped to be its last, both studied the past for philosophical rather than historical reasons, and both read their predecessors as taking halting steps toward a vision they themselves would expound — a way of writing history only supreme self-confidence could license. Against that stands the possibility, voiced in the introduction through Wittgenstein, that philosophy makes no progress at all, because the same problems that troubled the Greeks trouble us, our language returning us endlessly to the same questions. Kenny frames the tension as one between viewing philosophy as a science, cumulative and self-superseding, and viewing it as an art, whose difficulties recur and whose earlier achievements are not left behind. He does not resolve it so much as hold it open, treating the therapeutic view — that a confusion may be so cleared up that it no longer tempts the unwary — as a genuine third possibility that allows for change over time without guaranteeing progress in any direction.

**The Method: Chronological Survey and Thematic Treatment**

The most practical feature of the book is structural, and it repeats in each of the four parts. Kenny describes himself as combining the two ways histories are usually built — the chronological and the thematic — by offering in every part first a chronological survey of the period and then a thematic treatment of particular topics of abiding importance. The recurring themes are stable across the whole span: how to argue, or logic; the limits of knowledge, or epistemology; how things happen, or physics; what there is, or metaphysics; soul and mind; how to live, or ethics; and God, with language taking its own chapters as the modern parts arrive. Because the same headings return part after part, a reader can follow a single question — the soul, say, or the proofs of God — across two millennia and watch how each age reformulates it, while a reader after the story of a period can stay with the survey and drop into the themes only for amplification. This double architecture is Kenny's answer to the oldest problem of the genre, that a strict chronicle buries the ideas and a strict topical treatment loses the sequence; he refuses to choose, and gives the same material twice under two lights.

**The Long Continuum: Ancient, Medieval, Modern**

The four parts trace hinges rather than clean breaks. The first runs from the beginnings of philosophy to the conversion of Augustine, whose writings channelled Platonic thought toward the Middle Ages and whose conversion marks the seam between the ancient and the medieval worlds; the second carries the story from Augustine to the early sixteenth century; the third ends with the death of Hegel; and the fourth brings the narrative up to the final years of the second millennium. Throughout, Kenny holds that the whole history is dominated by Plato and Aristotle, whom no later philosopher has surpassed, while insisting that their successors — Stoics, Epicureans, Neoplatonists, and the medievals — reward the close attention that an older curriculum, leaping straight from Aristotle to Descartes, denied them. His treatment of the Middle Ages is a defense of a continuum: Aquinas retains, in his view, the right to be called the greatest philosopher of the high medieval period, but he stands as one peak in a range whose lesser summits are not negligible, and to read any single figure is to take a sounding of an ongoing process rather than to meet an isolated system. The same humility governs the whole: Kenny writes that of many of his subjects he writes of necessity as an amateur rather than an expert, having published on Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Frege, and Wittgenstein but standing, elsewhere, on ground others have worked more deeply.

For this library the volume is a single-author companion to the multi-hand and multi-volume histories already on the shelf — a whole tradition surveyed from one vantage, offered beside Copleston's longer set and Hegel's own lectures as a way of holding the entire arc of Western thought in view at once.