<P><B>A masterly distillation of two-and-a-half millennia of intellectual history, and a readable and entertaining crash course in Western philosophy</B></P><P>Short, sharp, and entertaining, this survey covers the development of all aspects of the<br>Western philosophical tradition from the ancient Greeks to the present day. No major representative of any significant strand of Western thought escapes the author's attention: 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; the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; Kierkegaard and the existentialists; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein; and—last but not least—the four shapers-in-chief of our modern world: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein.