A Brief History of the Ideas of Western Philosophy: Sensations, Necessity, Knowledge, and God

This book is a survey of the most important ideas in the history of Western philosophy. The idea is stated, along with the name of the philosopher who first or most famously articulated it, a brief explanation and analysis of the idea is provided, and then the book moves on to the next idea. By the end of this book, you should have a sense of all the most important ideas in philosophy, as well as a scheme for how those ideas all fit together and relate to each other, forming a comprehensive, simple, elegant, and powerful, vision of philosophy. The book is divided into the following sections, based around the historical phases of philosophy: Modern philosophy, featuring Locke, Hume, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, followed by a special section with an analysis of Karl Marx as Left-Hegelian and Ayn Rand as Right-Hegelian; Ancient philosophy, featuring Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas; Post-Modern philosophy, featuring Wittgenstein, Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche; ethics and moral philosophy, featuring Utilitarianism, Pragmatism, Augustine, Kant, Karl Marx, and Ayn Rand; political philosophy, featuring Rousseau, Hobbes, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Rawls, and Nozick; and lastly there is a section on the author Russell Hasan's own philosophical ideas, and how they fit into the narrative of the history of the ideas of Western philosophy. I must caution my reader that my methods in writing this book are, perhaps, more the methodology of a lawyer than that of a philosopher, as I was taught in law school the system for the analysis of case law, that, for a case, instead of focusing on the language of the case and specific quotes of what the judge said, you summarize the entire case into one single sentence, which is the proposition that the entire case stands for as a whole. As ambitious as this is, in this book, I have at times taken some of the greatest philosophers in human history and summarized them in one sentence.