Already you can see what the primary dilemma of such a project is: how to make such an expansive history with so many characters orderly in composition yet alive to the reader. It starts with the pre-Socratic philosophers and ends with today’s academic philosophy. Grayling’s tome is exactly what it says it is: the history of philosophy. A few people will read the book once I can’t imagine anyone will read it twice. If anything, you’d be working in the train’s engine room. If anything, you’re traveling against the river’s current. Even these metaphors don’t really capture the difficulty in reading it. It offers no moment or incentive to stop, meander, or backtrack, the goal being not to enjoy the journey but to reach the end. Or, to change metaphors, the book is a bullet train rather than a car ride. Because the water is shallow, your legs would always be bumping up against the debris (a stand-in for academic jargon). Traveling down it, you’d have little to see and little time to see it. Grayling’s The History of Philosophy were a river, it would be shallow with a strong current.
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