Author: Philip Stokes
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing Ltd.
382 pages, paperback
Author
Amazon.com provides the following information about Philip Stokes: "Phil Stokes is married with two children and currently living in Thailand. He teaches English language and Critical Thinking skills at a Thai university, while pondering - ever so slowly - on the prospect of turning his scrivenings into further books. His latest work is an opensource critical thinking textbook written for lecturers and students of philosophy." In addition to this, the author has a blog (essential thinking.wordpress.com), where he states that he studied philosophy at the University of Reading and the University of Bristol.
Structure and Content
This work is sort of a Reader's Digest version of the 100 philosophers and their philosophy. On average, the author devotes 3-4 pages to each philosopher. So obviously the volume only provides a very brief introduction into the philosophy of each philosopher. In short, it is designed as an introduction for readers who have no or very little background in philosophy.
Professor Stokes divides the philosophers into several groups: The Presocratics, The Eleatics, The Academics, The Atomists, The Cynics, The Stoics, The Sceptics, The Neoplatonists, The Christians, The Scholastics, The Age of Science, The Rationalists, The Empiricists, The Idealists, The Liberals, The Evolutionists, The Pragmatists, The Materialists, The Existentialists, The Linguistic Turn, The Postmodernists, The New Scientists.
As for content, the philosophers focus (among other things) on everything from the origins of the universe, to dialectics such as mind and body, matter and spirit, good and evil, faith and atheism, universal and particular, individual and collective, to the meaning-or lack thereof-of human existence.
After reading this volume, I was left with the following question: Why did the author choose these philosophers, and omit others? For example, there are only two women-Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir. Therefore, I would highly recommend readers to balance this male-dominated volume with any of the following ones: Women Philosophers: A Bio-Critical Source Book by Ethel M. Kersey, Women Philosophers by Mary Warnock, The Philosopher Queens by Rebecca Buxton & Lisa Whiting, A History of Women Philosophers: Ancient Women Philosophers 600 B.C. - 500 A.D. by Mary Ellen Waithe.
