A History of Philosophy
Frederick Copleston's nine-volume history (1946–1974) — the standard English-language Catholic-Neo-Scholastic survey of Western philosophy from the Presocratics to Sartre
Tradition: Neo-Scholastic Thomism / English Catholic philosophy of religion / analytic-friendly Catholic scholarship
Copleston's 1946–74 nine-volume history — the standard English-language Catholic survey of Western philosophy
Composed across nearly three decades by the English Jesuit Frederick Copleston (1907–1994), 'A History of Philosophy' (Burns Oates / Doubleday, 1946–1974, nine volumes) became the standard English-language survey of Western philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. The volumes — I Greece and Rome; II Augustine to Scotus; III Ockham to Suárez; IV Descartes to Leibniz; V Hobbes to Hume; VI Wolff to Kant; VII Fichte to Nietzsche; VIII Bentham to Russell; IX Maine de Biran to Sartre — combine fair-minded exposition with a Neo-Scholastic-Thomist evaluative framework. Originally a textbook for Catholic seminarians, the work became universally used in the English-speaking world.
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Editions cited
- A History of Philosophy (Burns Oates, London, 1946–1974); Doubleday Image, 1962–77 paperback reissue; Continuum reissue, 2003
School Embodiments
The History's evaluative scaffolding is Neo-Scholastic-Thomist throughout — Aquinas as the implicit standard.
"The student of philosophy comes back, in the end, to St Thomas as to a settled centre." (A History of Philosophy, vol. II, preface)
Scholastic-systematic taxonomy of the philosophical tradition.
"Scholastic philosophy provides the natural framework for the history of Western thought." (A History of Philosophy, vol. II)
Implicit perennial-philosophy thesis — the great questions recur, the great answers converge on the realist tradition.
"The same fundamental questions recur in every age of Western thought." (A History of Philosophy, vol. IX, conclusion)
Natural-theological framework: philosophy as ancilla to faith.
"Reason and revelation are not rivals but distinct modes of access to one truth." (A History of Philosophy, vol. II)
Historicist sensitivity to philosophical schools in context, even within the Thomist evaluative frame.
"Each philosopher must first be understood in his own terms before he can be assessed." (A History of Philosophy, vol. I, methodological introduction)
Analytic-philosophical tradition.
Internal Tensions
The standard mid-twentieth-century English-language history of philosophy; superseded in specifics by later monographs but never displaced as a single coherent survey.
I. Time
1946–1974 — twentieth-century English Catholic survey of two and a half millennia of Western thought.
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II. Space
England / Rome — Jesuit-academic context.
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III. Matter
Nine-volume historical survey covering Greek, medieval, modern, and contemporary philosophy.
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IV. Observer
Copleston as the implicit Neo-Scholastic evaluator of the tradition he surveys.
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V. Energy
Sustained career-long synthesising labour.
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VI. Information
Approximately six thousand pages of historical exposition with extensive bibliography.
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Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How A History of Philosophy resolves each dilemma
31 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 26 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.