I. The search for world order : ancient philosophy -- The "Axial period" and the origins of philosophy -- The "miracle" of Greece -- Philosophy, myth, religion, and science -- Meaning and creation : cosmogony and the origins of philosophy -- Vedas and Vedanta : early philosophy in India -- The first (Greek) philosopher -- The pre-Socratic philosophers (I) : the stuff of the world -- The pre-Socratic philosophers (II) : the underlying order -- The pre-Socratic philosophers (III) : the pluralists -- Enter the Sophists -- Socrates -- Plato : metaphysician or sublime humorist? -- The philosopher's philosopher : Aristotle -- A footnote to Plate (and Aristotle) -- Tough times : stoicism, skepticism, and Epicureanism -- Mysticism and logic in ancient India : Nagarjuna and Nyaya -- II. God and the philosophers : religious and medieval philosophy -- Religion and spirituality : three philosophical themes -- The wisdom of the East (I) : Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism -- The wisdom of the East (II) : Confucius and Confucianism -- The wisdom of the East (III) : Lao-tzu, Chuang-tzu, and Taoism -- Deep in the heart of Persia : Zoroastrianism -- From Athens to Jerusalem : Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- The Hebrew people and the origins of Judaism -- Greek Jew : Philo of Alexandria -- The birth of Christianity -- The opening of Christianity : St. Paul -- Neoplatonism and Christianity -- St. Augustine and the inner life of spirit -- The first great split within Christianity -- The rise of Islam -- Mysticism -- Persia and the peripatetic tradition -- Diaspora, dialectic, and mysticism in Judaism -- Thinking God : Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, and scholasticism -- Late scholasticism : Duns Scotus and William of Ockham -- In search of essences : the alchemists -- Philosophical syntheses outside the West -- The reformation : Luther and his progeny -- The counter-reformation, Erasmus, and more -- After Aristotle : Bacon, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and the Renaissance -- Before the "discovery" : Africa and the Americas --
III. Between science and religion : modern philosophy and the enlightenment -- Science, religion, and the meaning of modernism -- Montaigne : the first modern philosopher? -- Descartes and the new science -- Spinoza, Leibniz, Pascal, and Newton -- The enlightenment, colonialism, and the eclipse of the Orient -- Locke, Hume, and empiricism -- Adam Smith, the moral sentiments, and the Protestant ethic -- Voltaire, Rousseau, and revolution -- Immanuel Kant : saving science -- Kant's moral philosophy and the third Critique -- The discovery of history : Hegel -- Philosophy and poetry : rationalism and romanticism -- Romantic West meets East : Schopenhauer -- After Hegel : Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, and Marx -- Mill, Darwin, and Nietzsche : consumerism, energy, and evolution -- Early philosophy in America -- IV. From modernism to postmodernism : the twentieth century -- The rejection of idealism : a century of horrors -- Frege, Russell, and Husserl : arithmetic, atomism, phenomenology -- Zarathustra in the trenches : the limits of rationality -- The American experience in philosophy : pragmatism -- Changing reality : philosophies of process -- Unamuno, Croce, and Heidegger : the tragic sense of life -- Hitler, the Holocaust, positivism, and existentialism -- No exit : the existentialism of Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir -- From ideal to ordinary language : from Cambridge to Oxford -- Women and gender : the feminization of philosophy -- The return of the oppressed : Africa, Asia, and the Americas -- From postmodernism to the new age -- World philosophy : promise or pretense.
Book