This new, brilliantly written overview of the history of philosophy provides a philosophical summary of the guiding themes of philosophical thought from its beginnings to the present day, and it also meets the criterion that one of the tasks of philosophy is to provide pleasure.

Content: Philosophical movements of Humanism and the Renaissance, the beginning of the new worldview, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch de Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, David Hume, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the philosophy of the 19th century, introduction and overview, Immanuel Kant, early German Idealism: Fichte, Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Schelling's late philosophy, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche.