Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- The ancient world, 700 BCE-250 CE : Everything is made of water: Thales of Miletus ; The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao: Laozi ; Number is the ruler of forms and ideas: Pythagoras ; Happy is he who overcome his ego: Siddhartha Gautama ; Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles: Confucius ; Everything is flux: Heraclitus ; All is one: Parmenides ; Man is the measure of all things: Protagoras ; When one throws to me a peach, I return to him a plum: Mozi ; Nothing exists except atoms and empty space: Democritus and Leucippus ; The life which is unexamined is not worth living: Socrates ; Earthly knowledge is but shadow: Plato ; Truth resides in the world around us: Aristotle ; Death is nothing to us: Epicurus ; He has the most who is the most content with the least: Diogenes of Sinope ; The goal of life is living in agreement with nature: Zeno of Citium -- The medieval world, 250-1500 : God is not the parent of evils: St. Augustine of Hippo ; God foresees our free thoughts and actions: Boethius ; The soul is distinct from the body: Avicenna ; Just by thinking about God we can know he exists: St. Anselm ; Philosophy and religion are not incompatible: Averroes ; God has no attributes: Moses Maimonides ; Don't grieve; anything you lose comes round in another form: Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi ; The universe has not always existed: Thomas Aquinas ; God is the not-other: Nikolaus von Kues ; To know nothing is the happiest life: Desiderius Erasmus -- Renaissance and the age of reason, 1500-1750 : The end justifies the means: Niccolò Machiavelli ; Fame and tranquility can never by bedfellows: Michel de Montaigne ; Knowledge is power: Francis Bacon ; Man is a machine: Thomas Hobbes ; I think therefore I am: René Descartes ; Imagination decides everything: Blaise Pascal ; God is the cause of all things, which are in him: Benedictus Spinoza ; No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience: John Locke ; There are two kinds of truths: truths of reasoning and truths of fact: Gottfried Leibniz ; To be is to be perceived: George Berkeley -- The age of revolution : Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd: Voltaire ; Custom is the great guide of human life: David Hume ; Man was born free yet everywhere he is in chains: Jean-Jacques Rousseau ; Man is an animal that makes bargains: Adam Smith ; There are two worlds: our bodies and the external world: Immanuel Kant ; Society is indeed a contract: Edmund Burke ; The greatest happiness for the greatest number: Jeremy Bentham ; Mind has no gender: Mary Wollstonecraft ; What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is: Johann Gottlieb Fichte ; About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy: Friedrich Schlegel ; Reality is a historical process: Georg Hegel ; Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world: Arthur Schopenhauer ; Theology is anthropology: Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach ; Over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign: John Stuart Mill ; Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom: Søren Kierkegaard ; The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles: Karl Marx ; Must the citizen ever resign his conscience to the legislator?: Henry David Thoreau ; Consider what effects things have: Charles Sanders Peirce ; Act as if what you do makes a difference: William James --

The modern world, 1900-1950 : Man is something to be surpassed: Friedrich Nietzsche ; Men with self-confidence come and see and conquer: Ahad Ha'am ; Every message is made of signs: Ferdinand de Saussure ; Experience by itself is not science: Edmund Husserl ; Intuition goes in the very direction of life: Henri Bergson ; We only think when we are confronted with problems: John Dewey ; Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it: George Santayana ; It is only suffering that makes us persons: Miguel de Unamuno ; Believe in life: William du Bois ; The road to happiness lies in an organized diminution of work: Bertrand Russell ; Love is a bridge from poorer to richer knowledge: Max Scheler ; Only as an individual can man become a philosopher: Karl Jaspers ; Life is a series of collisions with the future: José Ortega y Gasset ; To philosophize, first one must confess: Hajime Tanabe ; The limits of my language are the limits of my world: Ludwig Wittgenstein ; We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed: Martin Heidegger ; The individual's only true moral choice is through self-sacrifice for the community: Tesuro Watsuji ; Logic is the last scientific ingredient of philosophy: Rudolf Carnap ; The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope: Walter Benjamin ; That which is cannot be true: Herbert Marcuse ; History does not belong to us but we belong to it: Hans-Georg Gadamer ; In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: Karl Popper ; Intelligence is a moral category: Theodor Adorno ; Existence precedes essence: Jean-Paul Sartre ; The banality of evil: Hannah Arendt ; Reason lives in language: Emmanuel Levinas ; In order to see the world we must break with our familiar acceptance of it: Maurice Merleau-Ponty ; Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female: Simone de Beauvoir ; Language is a social art: Willard Van Orman Quine ; The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains: Isaiah Berlin ; Think like a mountain: Arne Naess ; Life will be lived all the better if it has no meaning: Albert Camus -- Contemporary philosophy, 1950-present : Language is a skin: Roland Barthes ; How would we manage without a culture: Mary Midgley ; Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory: Thomas Kuhn ; The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance: John Rawls ; Art is a form of life: Richard Wollheim ; Anything goes: Paul Feyerabend ; Knowledge is produced to be sold: Jean-Franc̜ois Lyotard ; For the black man, there is only one destiny and it is white: Frantz Fanon ; Man is an invention of recent date: Michel Foucault ; If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion: Noam Chomsky ; Society is dependent upon a criticism of its own traditions: Jürgen Habermas ; There is nothing outside of the text: Jacques Derrida ; There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves: Richard Rorty ; Every desire has a relation to madness: Luce Irigaray ; Every empire tells itself and the world that is unlike all other empires: Edward Said ; Thought has always worked by opposition: Hélène Cixous ; Who plays God in present-day feminism?: Julia Kristeva ; Philosophy is not only a written enterprise: Henry Odera Oruka ; In suffering, the animals are our equals: Peter Singer ; All the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure: Slavoj Žižek -- Directory -- Glossary.

How did the universe begin? What is truth? How can we live good lives? Throughout history, humankind has asked these and other big questions about the nature of life and existence - and big thinkers have offered solutions that continue to shape our world. Written in plain English, The Philosophy Book is packed with short, pithy explanations that cut through the jargon, step-by-step diagrams that untangle knotty theories, classic quotes that make philosophy memorable, and witty illustrations that play with our ideas about ideas. Whether you're a complete beginner, an avid student, or an armchair expert, you'll find plenty of food for thought in this book.--Book jacket.

In English.