In "A Brief History of Western Thought," the most important ideas of Western intellectuals are presented, which developed during the evolution of humanity.
Stephen Trombley analyzes the life and work of the greatest thinkers. The narrative begins with the philosophers of Classical Antiquity and ends with contemporary thinkers.
Examined are: the Christian scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages; the great philosophers of the Enlightenment; the German idealists from Kant to Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham and Mill; Pers, James, and the American pragmatists; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein; Saussure and the structuralists; Barthes, Foucault, and the post-structuralists; and, finally, the four thinkers who shaped our modern world: the naturalist Charles Darwin with the theory of evolution; the philosopher, historian, and political theorist Karl Marx; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; and Albert Einstein, the founder of modern physics.
A distillation of the history of thought that covers two and a half millennia.