Customer Reviews

Thales to Dewey

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I found this book while browsing through the school library and, after remembering an awesome quote which was taken from it, I decided to check it out. Now, having read the book, I would like to recommend it to anyone wanting to study the history of philosophy.

The reason why is two-fold. First of all, the author has a skill rarely equalled in explaining the ideas of the major thinkers on a level the beginning student can understand. Secondly, he shows the errors that each philosopher makes only when it matters--and he does so eloquently.

As proof of the first, consider this quote (the one that I heard once and thankfully remembered) which is excerpted from the section dealing with Heraclitus:

"From a promontory above a mighty river as it flows down a valley, the river between a frame of trees seems to stand still as in a picture. We know that it moves, but we cannot see its motion. Sensation is too feeble and clumsy to see things as they are, and hence common opinion holds that some things do not move. On the contrary, all things flow. No man can ever step twice into the same river. How could he? The second time he tried to step, new waters would have flowed down from upstream: the water would not be the same. Neither would the bed and banks be the same, for the constant erosion would have changed them too. And if the river is the water, the bed, and the banks, the river is not the same river. Strictly speaking, there is no river. When common opinion names a river, it supposes that the name applies to something that will remain there for a time at least; but the river remains there no time at all. It has changed while you pronounce its name. There is no river. Worse yet, you cannot step into the same river twice because _you_ are not there twice. You too change, and the person who stepped the first time no longer exists to step the second time. A person is also a river, a stream of consciousness, as William James called it; and the stream of consciousness never has the same contents, the same bed or banks. Persons do not exist."

Wasn't that grand? I myself have never heard a more forceful (nor a more memorable) argument for the idea of a Heraclitean flux than that. But my second statement beckons for an example of its validity as well. And so, here is the author skillfully pointing out an error in the arguments of the skeptics:

"The skeptics call propositions false, doubtful, probable, and plausible. Their basic principle, however, does not in consistency permit them to use any of these terms. A false proposition is one opposite to the truth. How then can one say that a proposition is false, unless one knows the truth? A doubtful proposition is one that might possibly be true; a probable or plausible proposition resembles or approximates the truth. But it is impossible to apply these terms without knowing the truth by which they are determined."

Now, do you see my point? This truly is a great introduction. It not only "makes the difficult attempt of bringing the student up to philosophy's level," it succeeds. Because of this, it deserves much more than the five stars I'm giving it here.

Very readable, very concise. He could have easily rambled on and made it 1,000 pages, but he didn't. It's just 534 pages, and Thales to Dewey serves both as a history of philosophy and an introduction to philosophy itself.

Highly recommended as a companion to Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy.

This one volume History of Philosophy is an exceptional one, as it presents the main philosophical positions of the most influential philosophers starting from the first, Thales. If someone read through this book 3 or 4 times, he would certainly have a good grasp of what philosophy is all about. The conciseness of his writing style and his arrangement of ideas is remarkable. For anyone who wants to begin the study of philosophy should most definitely start here, as Gordon Clark does an admirable job of making the main ideas simple to the reader. Trying to read the primary sources of each philosopher presented in this book would certainly not be the best use of your time, as they normally ramble on about unimportant matters too often. Clark, on the contrary, targets the main points of each philosopher and puts them in words that are more intelligible than that of the main writers themselves.

If you are interested in philosophy, you absolutely must have this compact one volume history. During Clark's days, this book was a best seller in christian and secular institutions and was highly praised by all sorts of philosophers.

I would particularly recommend it to christian pastors who have not studied any philosophy because knowing the most influential ideas of the last 2500 years is a must for anyone who wants to have an impact today in the pulpit.

Highly recommend this masterpiece.

In this volume, Gordon Haddon Clark (not "Maddon"; that's a typo on Amazon's part) provides a thorough survey of the history of philosophy. His overarching concern is to argue that secular philosophy cannot provide knowledge of truth and that -- as he suggests on his closing page -- it might be necessary to consider seriously the possibility of divine revelation as the sole alternative to total skepticism. This volume, while suitable as an introduction to philosophical thought, thereby also segues nicely into Clark's own philosophical theology of "Scriptural presuppositionalism."

Now, that philosophy is not without its flaws. In the first place, Clark does not, to my knowledge, ever consider the possibility that "Scripture" might consist of anything other than the Christian Bible; why the Jewish scriptures are inadequate by themselves is not addressed. (If it is argued that the "Old Testament" contains clear pointers to the "New," I shall argue in reply that it contains much clearer pointers to the Oral Law and the Talmud. For example, the written text clearly assumes that its readers have knowledge of various practices -- e.g. the wearing of tefillin, the ritually-correct method of slaughtering animals -- that are not discussed in the text itself. For another, an oral tradition of some kind would have been necessary just to guide the pronunciation of Hebrew words that would have been ambiguous without vowel points. Nothing so clear as this is offered by the standard Christian readings of "Old Testament" prophecies, which uniformly depend on wrenching passages out of context.)

In the second place, Clark's eminently defensible view that God is rational and logical would, on the face of it, seem also to provide a foundation for criticizing the text of Scripture itself. (If the Bible teaches that God is logical, and the Bible is then found to contain contradictions, do we not have a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument against Scriptural inerrancy?) In fact Clark takes it to be a foundation for criticism of _misunderstandings_ of God's axiomatically-inerrant Word, and at a broad, general level this approach is surely defensible. But why this tack cannot be likewise taken by defenders of the Torah (or the Koran) is never made sufficiently clear.

However, these issues actually tell in favor of the usefulness of the present volume. Though Clark himself would surely not have condoned its use in the defense of faiths other than Calvinist Christianity, many of his critiques of opposing philosophies and even some of his defenses of "presuppositionalism" could be profitably adopted by, e.g., Jewish theologians. His reading of philosophical history should therefore be of interest more generally than just to Calvinists.

And at any rate, it is all too seldom that a really great philosophical-theological mind tackles the entire history of philosophy in the first place. Clark certainly deserves respectful attention in this regard by rationalistically-inclined religious believers everywhere, whether their primary philosophical-theological loyalties are to Moses Maimonides or to John Calvin.