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UdeRecife

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Peter Adamson: Classical philosophy (2014, Oxford University Press) 5 stars

Peter Adamson aims ultimately to present a complete history of philosophy, more thoroughly but also …

Review of 'Classical philosophy' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

What makes this a great history of philosophy is precisely its “without any gaps approach”. This because, as Peter Adamson himself recognizes on the last section of this book, if you’re studying philosophy in, say, an undergraduate course, and you’re doing the usual flyover on the whole history of the great philosophers that are most of your classes, usually “you might reasonably expect to jump from Aristotle to, perhaps, Descartes, leaping over about 2,000 years of history in the process” (ADAMSON, 2014). Yes, time is short and there’s too much of the good stuff to cover without having to deal with what most histories deem the minor thinkers.

This is unfortunate, because with such huge gaps in the narrative, you get the impression that some of the thinkers, or their ideas, just come out of the blue, making them seem more extraordinary than they really were.

Well, not in …