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.